#the want to just... full on leave is strong but homestuck will always be on my dash because of those i follow

[fefairys]

sorry a lot of this reread liveblog is just me posting quotes from the authors notes but there is so much good stuff in here

"By the very nature of trolls, a lot of these guys were always going to be pretty bad, obnoxious, gross, or creepy, particularly at first glance. So one major challenge I found interesting was something like, "How do you introduce someone who appears to be almost instantly revolting or objectionable, and then proceed to make the reader love this person against all odds?" Equius is probably the strongest example up to this point of me embracing this idea as a challenge. The initial impressions he gives are pretty horrible. He's constantly angry, racist, humorless, has weird horse porn everywhere, and...oh no, does he BEAT HIS LUSUS TOO?? Just awful. But the unfolding of his character thereafter reveals certain mitigating truths. He doesn't beat his lusus, he's just so strong he leaves bruises despite his best efforts at tenderness. It's like a disability he struggles with. If you want to go full sadstuck, picture him unable to hug his dear moirail upon meeting her, for fear of crushing her fragile bones. There are many small ways his portrait is guided so that a guy who really has no right to be seen as endearing ends up being strangely so, often in ways that aren't even easy to explain. I firmly believe that if you don't love Equius after you've read most of Homestuck, then there's something wrong with you." -Andrew Hussie

#sams reading homestuck again #homestuck #equius

[dreadedender]

Drawing My Homestuck Ships Part 2

Continuing doodling and talking about ships I like, lol.

1. EriNep: My eyes widened when the story mentioned Eridan tried getting into a relationship with Nepeta and we didn't get to see any of it. Since then, my head's been full of the possibilities. I hinted at it in my Meenah's Feferi AU, but I'd like to make an AU where Eridan gets character development by not being isolated from the group as he was, instead, hitching onto the Meowrals' dynamic. Think about it! As Equius has most of his attention on Aradiabot during the early days of the session, Nepeta 'gets stuck' with Eridan and the two gain a strange bond. Nepeta has a pension for picking up and managing pathetic saps (*looks at Equius*) so although he's annoyed her in the past, seeing him post-break up intrigues her cursed shipper heart to try to help him get out of his funk. Any stupidity thrown her way, she's able to bite back perfectly well, and at the threat of her leaving and him being alone, he would always calm down and apologize. Their spats slowly subside the more time they spend together (maybe she even sticks around his horrid world and helps soothe the Angels before the massacre really begins), and come near the end of their SGURB session, Equius is able to rejoin the dynamic again and makes an uneasy peace with his 'mortal enemy'as both are disgruntled highbloods watching their privilege being reduced to nothing. But with his new connection, Eridan doesn't think about leaving anymore. He's still mad, but not nearly as desperate. He's got friends now. And his connection with Nep only grows stronger when Gamzee snaps, Eridan is tasked by Equius to protect Nepeta, and he dies doing so. (May write the scene and more shippy moments in their friendship prior to dying later)

2. JadeTav: I WISH THEY GOT TO MEET. It didn't occur to me at all that Karkat was Jade's patron troll. I really thought it was Tavros! And I had hoped that his confession would bear fruit later on in the story, after they actually got to know each other better through the journey. Tavros really took it like a champ! It made me so proud of him :[ Maybe I should make an AU for it where Tavros lives and IS the troll to help her the most. I just think their friends-to-lovers potential was too strong and wrongfully cut short. They had a wholesome, supportive, and dorky dynamic. (And yeah maybe it would've been cool too to slap back Vriska's taunts about him being pathetic for being 'friendzoned' by having them be official later. They were good for each other, they just needed time.)

3. EquiKat: This stems, like I am realizing most of these ships do, from my desire of the canon interactions to have gone differently. I would have liked to have seen a rougher Equius that posed more of a threat to Karkat's leadership instead of him being all talk and no action. Yeah the bit is funny that he likes being bossed by lowerbloods, but I felt it would have been better to see more of the struggle of him not wanting to let go of his stubborn beliefs (and it'd help give him more reason to 'give in' to Gamzee killing him other than 'haha horni', that he was actually glad something was 'making sense' to him again).

So there'd be constant arguing between the two, Karkat getting especially vicious with the increasing criticism, eve having fun finding new ways to shut the indigo-blood up quicker just by getting closer to him, until enough time passes and he has the very disturbing realization that the headaches he got from having Equius around have been replaced with catharsis and clear-headedness after their arguments. Equius provides an outlet for him to get all his frustrations out, and after their big show of insults, the two are able to calmly talk things over, and Karkat can actually think clearly. He jas very clearly fallen into a pitch relationship with the sweaty horse troll. He's embarrassed, and the others jump at making fun of the situation.

Nepeta is baffled and miffed that he got into Karkat's shipping chart before her.

#homestuck #homestuck ships #jadetav #jade x tavros #tavjade #equikat #erinep #eridan x nepeta #equius x karkat #homestuck karkat #karkat vantas #karkat #eridan ampora #homestuck eridan #eridan #nepeta #nepeta leijon #homestuck nepeta #homestuck jade #jade harley #hs jade #tavros nitram #hs tavros #homestuck tavros #homestuck au #homestuck alt timeline

[29pageshomestuckeveryday]

Homestuck, page 2,215

======>

Seriously, he's like a soft summer peach.

Author commentary: Once Homestuck hit its "start introducing way too many characters" stride (Hivebent is exactly when that occured), there were a lot of issues I started thinking about when it came to rolling out tons of diverse, often ridiculous new characters. Primarily, I saw them as interesting challenges in writing and characterization. By the very nature of trolls, a lot of these guys were always going to be pretty bad, obnoxious, gross, or creepy, particularly at first glance. So one major challenge I found interesting was something like, "How do you introduce someone who appears to be almost instantly revolting or objectionable, and then proceed to make the reader love this person against all odds?" Equius is probably the strongest example up to this point of me embracing this idea as a challenge. The initial impressions he gives are pretty horrible. He's constantly angry, racist, humorless, has weird horse porn everywhere, and…oh no, does he BEAT HIS LUSUS TOO?? Just awful. But the unfolding of his character thereafter reveals certain mitigating truths. He doesn't beat his lusus, he's just so strong he leaves bruises despite his best efforts at tenderness. It's like a disability he struggles with. If you want to go full sadstuck, picture him unable to hug his dear moirail upon meeting her, for fear of crushing her fragile bones. There are many small ways his portrait is guided so that a guy who really has no right to be seen as endearing ends up being strangely so, often in ways that aren't even easy to explain. I firmly believe that if you don't love Equius after you've read most of Homestuck, then there's something wrong with you.

#gif

[blurrymango]

Consumed by thoughts of Evil Morty and Rick Prime in love.

Which is. Well that is literally the most delusional pairing I have.

I mean like.

Well uh. Let's see how about Outlast and what I ship in that. Weddie. At least one half of that ship has an obsessive violent "love" for the other. It's one-sided yeah. But it's full of potential for "what if's" and GUILT. Waylon, the idea of not being able to save Eddie from the insanity that was inflicted haunting him every night. Eddie, the idea of him surviving and all the shit that comes from the guilt of knowing what he did to so many people that night and constantly wondering about the one that got away. A groom who's mind is muddled and twisted and a reluctant bride who sealed his fate. They could have been beautiful together, you know.

And my most recent of 2doc. Stockholm syndrome in a nutshell, basically just an idiot who keeps getting back together with a terrible abusive ex. Murdoc put 2D into that damn coma, but also got him out of it. Damn satanist putting his "blue haired black eyed god" through constant physical and mental agony and yet. 2D still loves him. Even after the events of Plastic Beach and Murdoc being locked up for long enough for 2D to taste freedom from that agony. They still save eachother. They still love eachother. Murdoc has said his favorite colors are blue and green. Blue and goddamn green.

And 15 seasons of Supernatural for- Wincest. Well c'mon man. Literal canonical soulmates who died for eachother countless times. That damn quote about them being irrationally emotionally erotically co-dependent on each other or what the ffuck ever. The vessels of good and evil who go against fate time and time again because they choose each other. Even when they'd be objectively living better lives apart, they wouldn't be happy like that. Because ever since John put baby Sammy in Dean's arms that fateful night and told him to protect him or whatever it has always been the two of them. Sam and Dean. Even in the face of certain doom, it's the two of them. Heaven is an open road for them to drive down.

Homestuck is gay and cringe but y'know what isn't. GamKar. Knight of Blood and Bard of Rage. Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn. Moirails made in shite circumstances. Fear and uncertainty and anger and longing. Miraculous blood and insanity. Sopor pies the color of lime the color of what Karkat was mutated from. Tragedy and comedy and red and green swirling together into madness. Mirthful Messiahs and Signless Sufferers and clowns and crabs. Royalty of Prospit. Doomed and retconned timelines leaving us with only crumbs of what could have been. Karkat's purple recuperacoon to go Gamzee's red.

And well. Of course. Rick and Morty. Rick and Morty, forever and forever, a hundred years Rick and Morty! It's Rick and Morty against the everything. Complementary brainwaves be damned y'know, cosmic destiny be damned. That's not even his "real" Rick. But it is. Dimensions left behind and lies upon lies because admitting the truth is emotionally vulnerable but love is shown through actions and they have proven to each other that the love they have is legit. Yes, it's far from perfect, downright toxic at times. But it's strong. It's persistent and true and unbreakable despite their doubts.

But for. *checks nonexistent notes* The ffuck do you mean it's almost 5 AM that's not real. Anyway. Evil Morty wants nothing to do with Ricks of any kind. His main goal has always been escaping that bullshit. And Rick Prime well. He's a ffucking careless psycho. Why does he do the shit he does? Ffuck if I remember. He doesn't give a shit about a Morty and that's obvious. Plus with the events of season 7 y'know. It does not make sense at all. That pairing.

But you know how it is with spaghetti.

#mango man speaks #i think this post is a bit cringe #guys imma be honest. i think i posted cringe with this one. #and on the off chance someone thinks about reblogging this. #why? lol. #i have other ships but the ones listed here were the first ones to come to mind. #im blaming the cringe of this post on the late hour. #i almost dont even want to post this. #ok well here goes nothing.

[plugnuts]

I can't help but want to leave the Homestuck fandom

#bits of banter #vent post #negativity #i've my reasons #i don't feel at home here anymore #i based my whole tumblr around it for a time but now it just feels Wrong #i made a lot of friends here and i've distanced myself from those people as well #i guess i just feel... awkward still being associated with this fandom #the want to just... full on leave is strong but homestuck will always be on my dash because of those i follow #i don't want to lose my mutuals but i know i've already lost someone important to me in this fandom #my own john blog feels like a disaster knowing i've had Two other mods who have just as quickly #left the blog #sigh #homestuck which has once brought me joy just brings me sadness nowadays :( #sorry

[dahniwitchoflight]

Airy Thoughts about Heirs and Gender

That kind of always has been John’s modus operandi when it comes to dealing with problems though hasn’t it?

Eveen waaaaay back in the beginning when John totally pushed it out of his mind that his dad was actually just a normal business man and not obsessed with clowns, that it was actually John who was obsessed with clowns, and jokes and pranking, thats always been how he deals with stuff he doesn’t like

Ignore it, make it not real, don’t acknowledge it, compartmentalize it, heck, joke about it, do pranks, make it silly, make it lighter, try to lessen the seriousness of it all

John has ZERO skill when it comes to actually dealing with perceived negativity in any sense, always been very reliant on basically his Aspect’s traits to solve problems for him

and now its becomes so bad, thats hes on the edge of having a full blown dissociation disorder about it

(I wonder actually if being too reliant on what’s been given to you on your plate already is a trait overall for Heirs or Those Who Inherit? It fits well with my previous idea of Heirs notable for being stuck in ruts, but it seems the true train of thought here, is that Heirs basically are caught in a pre-determined state, the lines have been drawn around them, their plates have been served, and they have to deal with what’s given to them, and as a result, have ZERO ability to handle situations that their pre-equipped toolset cannot deal with)

definitely an area where Heirs are prone to overembracing, when they become so, reliant on their pre-existing toolset, that they become unable to change things ups, see things differently, handle different problems

There’s an element of priveledged behavior here that clearer to me now, people who Inherit their wealth have no idea what it’s like to work for it or earn it themselves

and now isn’t THAT a connection to Maid and Heir?

this is where you could spin Heir as someone who starts out having no idea how to create something new and having to forcibly learn that

I could see someone creating a Maid/Heir argument for this

but then the problems arise of “how is that different from the Maid’s arc of also having to learn to take what was given them and start making anew what they want”

and the biggest hurdle to Creation Heir: Heir is not a feminine associated class

and the reason this matters, is if creation doesn’t have to be feminine associated, then masculinity gets the lion’s share of creation and destruction in Homestuck overall, and that feels like favoring masculinity too much, especially with how much Creation and Destruction as concepts are overvalued over the other aspects by far, it’s tilting it too far in one direction, when these Red and Green concept should spiral Equal (theoretically)

its out of step with how Creation and Destruction have been shown to be thus far

BUT

All of this was how things went down for me, back before June Egbert became a thing

So, in reading this, and with having the knowledge June might actually be a girl (maybe, Hussie said so, but thus far have yet to see anything from John in canon)

is that enough to make “Heir” feminine associated overall? moreso than other feminine associated classes like Maid/Sylph/Witch? Enough to be a strong enough pair to the Maid over Sylph? Two words that can literally mean “Girl”

Equius and Mituna still exist, what does that say about them? Is the background joke of Equius in a Maid outfit starting to actually become relevant?

who knows, but, It’s bringing up interesting questions I think, for me at least

John is the Main of Main Characters, versus Equius being background and Void aspected and Mituna being essentially non-existant, is that enough to balance out importance wise of who really gets to define what being an Heir means?

is it distateful to call being Spoiled an essentially feminine associated trait, if it’s balanced out by Maids being hardworking (or Servile..?) as opposed to a royally spoiled Prince and silly clown Bard?

better question, are these questions about gender things that Hussie never actually thought that deep enough about, so theres threads of things that could work, but end up falling apart in practice, revealing biases unfortunately baked into the system itself

cuz its like this: if Sylph/Maid is the females creation classes, its making sure girls vs boys in the grand scheme of things is equal, but that’s kind of going with the quid pro quo of masculine destruction/female creation thats baked into homestuck from the start, which is likely just the result in the authors inherent bias. Is that a net good? or a net bad? kind of unsure

if creation doesn’t have to be female, the idea that we should just be able to do away with the idea of gendered classes entirely is a thing, which is good in its own context, unfortunately leaves things with a different unfortunate gendered bias, where masculinity gets all the good shit and importance and feminine associations get sidelined and its unequal again, is this a better or worse way of seeing things? if male just happens to get the lions share of cool stuff, does it mean we can ignore gendered classes altogether, or is that exacerbating the problem with gendered classes to begin with

if a class that so far, hasnt had any traits associated with either masculinity or femininity (kind of a lie with Heirs being unusually good at the “mangrit” stat) gets strongly associated with femininity via one main character, is that enough to tip the scales and make things balanced again?

(is the above perhaps just a beautiful metaphor for the question of said characters eventual transition?)

(yknow, if that actually happens in canon, and gets explored by John/June at some point, and doesnt just die as an author word of god background fun fact..)

basically, Ive been wondering exactly how much the who gendered association of classes in homestuck should matter, but more importantly, how much it’s already affecting

would it be a good step to make Heir/Maid a creation pair? or is that just making a small problem bigger

tl;dr basically if Hussie makes it clear in canon that June Egbert has been a girl/dealing with a gender struggle all along in the way that they always have done by trying to downplay/ignore/compartmentalize it then yeah, Heir Maid gets a lot stronger legs to me, purely for the character symbolism of it all and the great message that would say about the gender construct of homestuck overall

but

if John Egbert remains the status quo, if Hussie never actually intended John to transition, if it never gets brought up in any way other than the authors saying out of the workd “I said so” Heir Maid as creation just doesn’t work without that Transition metaphor, so it fallbacks to the traditionally neutral Sylph/Maid as creation oriented

though, there’s also the fun question of what if through change of the characters themselves, their classes change with them? So through the power of Main Character June changes the associated traits Heir has overall OR stops being an Heir and gets a different class, both would be equally cool transition metaphors (which ironically would just reinforce Heir as a class of Change/Transmutation overall but lol)

#John Egbert #June Egbert #Heir Class #homestuck #Sometimes I wonder if Im giving too much or not enough credit to Hussie when it comes to gender stuff

[macklives]

session 92 end (bye 413...)

this session was so long but so fucking hectic what the fuck

im going to try and slim it down to its bare essentials rather than go on a full rant because im pretty sure i want to make a post later on about vriska’s characterisation (not anything about me liking her/disliking her, just an analyse on her life really, so it wont be too bias because thats not the point of an analysis. i also want to do one on aradia, been meaning to for a while... hmm... damn i havent done much analogies lately, and i THINK the last long post on a character i made was about davesprite??? so its been a fucking while. that being said, ill leave a lot of details out for this end of session notes so i dont just repeat myself later on. rather will keep to plot points here and then make character points in another)

alright

first we had a page or two where aradia confided in nepeta about her being dead which means nepeta is the only one to know this revelation. im pretty sure aradia confided because there was no other way around it, since nepeta was her server player, so it was inevitable. either way, aradia still put her trust in nep, which means, if you think about it, nobody else knows and nobody else ever will. and considering aradia asked nep to keep it a secret, it probably wont get explored by others until MAYBE later on, whenever its plot relevant, so everyone will be in the dark about it for a while which ill have to remember for future dialogue and scenes with aradia in them

then we met vriska

which, yes, is a meme. i may not have been on a lot of fandom platforms, but you cant escape some of the stuff that goes around the internet. even if you dont know undertale, im pretty sure you know of sans. or komaeda if you have/havent seen danganronpa. its just.. the memes, ya know? ive heard from many sources of the “vriska did nothing wrong” quote (even through mbmbam which??? WHAT) but since i didnt even know what it meant, i never explored it so then i never knew it was a homestuck thing. imagine my surprise...... i think even at the time, i wouldnt have known what homestuck was either honestly so it wouldnt even matter. i only recently learned about the fandom.... uhh, maybe half a year ago??? yeah, august, so my knowledge was slim but vriska is a thing ive heard before, which still shocks me

goddammit

anyways back to her

so her intro was something, we pretty much found out she likes DnD (a FANATIC in fact) and feeds her lusus the flesh of living trolls. which is fucked up. but i wont get too much into detail about that until i make a post about her life on alternia and the consequences of such. or maybe just alternia in general...?? or *both* heheheh but i feel i need more information before i go off on a tangent about that

then we met??? white text dude?? who is a major asshole but an asshole with insults that hURted, to think i felt bad for VRISKA when that happened. woah.

i said before, but... karkat, he cant really hit deep because his insults are just HIM and his way to express himself. like some people find it natural to just go “FUCK YOU” to show emphasis on a point, and thats just karkats way. he may do it so aggressively that it takes you a second to realize what he said, but usually i dont take anything to heart whenever he spurts out some insults. ive progressed to the point where whatever he says, is just “karkat” and not him trying to be actively mean. rather, its now funny whenever he does say anything SOMEWHAT creative, dude has an imagination that goes on for miles

but vriska?? she IS trying to be a bully, you can tell. but i feel theres something much more to that. like shes trying to prove herself and her “blueblooded” demeanours or whatever the hierarchy is. she doesnt want to show emotions so she makes herself a barrier by being mean is what i can gather from her conversation with kanaya. im pretty sure youre not supposed to understand her until its pointed out and rather see her as an “antagonist” at first, but yeah, her insults are more pitiful than anything and i also cant take her too seriously. i may not like her as a person but her character is interesting because you cant always have the goodie two shoes as the protags. it doesnt diversify the characterisation so i like vriska as someone who makes the plot work and it becomes more interesting since you have someone that makes it harder for the main crew to progress. a happy-go-lucky adventure with no trouble and no turnabouts would be boring in a way. so having a character like vriska, or like this new white text guy, it makes you stop for a second and realize oh shit okay, here’s where shit CAN go wrong and WHY. and i do especially like it when these bastards of characters somehow have more depth than being the “bastard characters”. kinda humanizes them in a way. doesnt mean you have to LIKE them continuously, but theyre humans (trolls whatever) in the end and every person has their own story whether its for better or for worse

for example, i like her being placed into the story, along with white text, by how its all leading to this “accident” and is slowly showing us hints on what happened, but in the end, it wont be until later that we know the full story. even if it was in the past, it apparently is very vital to the plot and shapes how the characters act in the future, so important aspects like that are to look out for. and usually they only occur when theres been some trouble within friend dynamics. so without these bastard of characters, plot wouldnt grow AS strong and i often keep that in mind when i explore a story.

anyways, I HAD A POINT TO THIS: so vriska and karkat are characters who are yes, mean, but it seems to be their personality, and the way they either show emotions and convey feelings (karkat) or make a barrier so they DONT show emotions to produce vulnerability (vriska), white text guy seems to mostly be out to be an asshole. he told vriska she was useless to sum it up but im not too sure if this is one of those “first dialogue” to mould out a bias opinion before we even get to the character themselves, but judging by how vriska and karkat played out, he surely means something bad and i dont know how to explain it. but i cannot base anything off from one piece of dialogue. i dont even know what else to call him other than white text guy so...... ill just leave that out for now, until we finally get his introduction

though, i do wish to mention, and will expand on, im not wrong when i say karkat and vriska are similar but in different context. sorry if youre favourite is karkat and you dont like vriska, or vice versa, but uhhhh their introductions are so similar its uncanny and the way they’re portrayed is the same except one is more on crack about the meddling, while the other is angry about the meddling. similar to how it was with karkat, we were introduced to vriska talking with someone we knew (tavros) whom she obviously didnt like, so obviously, from her point of view, she wanted to be menacing. like how karkat was menacing to jade because she wouldnt listen to his point... he got angry, so he lashed out. but us, the readers, didnt know that. we thought “oh god its this asshole” until we made it further in the story and started to warm up to karkat. it may not be the same with vriska, she may be a bully regardless, but you cannot tell me we moulded a bias towards her character as we did when we first read karkat. theyre both truly mean to other people, maybe both for different reasons, but i do want to point out the similarities and not leave that out. im pretty sure andrew basically gave us a conversation that formed our opinion of a character right off the bat rather than go into depth of WHY they did it, and how they are naturally without the conditions of the game. which, you can also see with vriska when she conversed with kanaya. andrew started off with a character who only appears to speak once, and makes you judge them from first appearance alone, without any explanation as to why they said what they said and how they are with other characters, let says. so you assume they were simply a rude character. now look how karkat turned out. so im guessing in homestuck, the first impression should never be the opinion you stick with until MAYBE 5 more conversations with that character (each one different)

OKAY done with the vriska introduction, now to slutquius

yes, hes kinda weird, i have stated that many times. i have no idea what to say about him other than he likes porn, he likes centaur dick which just so happens to be his lusus as well and if that isnt a red flag idk what is

he also likes his lusus milk, right from the udders of his guardian

fun times, fun times

my opinion of equius kinda.. differs. which i should really put in place the “dont judge by first impression” rule, because at first i thought he was rude with, then i thought he was hhh okay, because i understood why he was being so protective over nepeta and her team placement, since the people she was going to play with WERE dangerous. but if you think about it, both sides will probably put you in danger. it just depends on which ones you confide in more to protect your back rather than those which would cause trouble on purpose, in my HONEST opinion. so equius was a little overdramatic on that part, but i got what he meant. he was on the blue team and he didnt want to leave nepeta alone without him on the red. but then this session happened. and he went back to being weird again because of the whole porn thing, especially being so open about it like dude chill youre 13. but the thing is, then i felt bad for him because hes basically touch starved. to say that he could break anything he touches, i doubt people would go up to him for hugs. in fear they would be crushed to death by a simple hug. so im guessing hes rather lonely and doesnt really know how to interact because of this. so i felt sad that he had to live a life where he needs to be careful of everything he touches so it doesnt break randomly. see? poor dude. but then things got weird. and im pretty sure hes a masochist. so my opinion on equius is a fucking cosine graph

which brings us to the final point:

gamzee and equius’ conversation

i dont even know.....like.........gamzee was unaware that equius was using him for his own power play roleplay, right? gamzee knew it was a roleplay but it had had some.. idk.... obvious sexual implications? and i bet gamzee didnt really know that? he thought they were only venting out through a simple roleplay and trying to get closer because he originally thought equius hated him, considering equius flat out said “i hate you” and gamzee went “you tell me everyday and im okay with that” so.. gamzee probably wanted only to get closer to equius so he helped out his little problem which.. thats so sweet but i feel bad he was coerced into something he didnt get, especially since he was innocent enough to go along without knowing equius’ true gain

anyways, equius was getting off with the hierarchy thing. considering he’s “lower” than gamzee, and gamzee is surprisingly ...high on the spectrum??? so equius wanted gamzee to boss him around, because it felt only natural to him since he’s the “inferior one” and gamzee is The Big Man. like i get that, but it was written in a way that was so uncomfortable, that i wish i didnt. equius is just a weird character... hes not BAD per say, but hes... hes something alright

but im really liking gamzee. the two things which struck me in that one conversation, was the “i dont get why we should dictate people by the colour of their blood, i just see people as people” piece of dialogue and “i cant go around pleasing just everything so its alright if you hate me”

thats... so good, idk. i really liked that. i also really liked when kanaya said “youre dangerous but dangerous people are needed and are important because it shapes you” like <33 my fucking heart

god homestuck may be a tad on the weird side with some of its characters but it surely knows how to create great lines of dialogue

and that concludes the long 4 hour session i did, hope you all enjoyed it

with that, i rest

#homestuck #homestuck liveblog #hs92 #hs92 end #i wrote more than i should have but i had a lot to say #just you wait for those analogy/analysis posts

[autumnblogs]

Day 3: Vendetta against Bro

Welcome back to more Homestuck Liveblogging. Picking up with Nannasprite as she prepares to give John the Dirt.

https://homestuck.com/story/421

Sburb’s opening move is to take John’s Dad away from him. If @mmmmalo​‘s theory about psychological storytelling is to be believed, Sburb provokes fear and then manifests it in the form of a character’s antagonists. If you wonder why I bring them up so much, it’s probably because I’ve been reading their blog lately. I am almost always game for more Homestuck theorization, and would love to be able to reference more people and engage with their thoughts in my theoryposts and liveblogging, so if you know somebody with good takes, please pass them along my way.

The Incipisphere, like John’s name, was invoked into existence by player/character action, but paradoxically, has always been that way. By engaging with Sburb, John authenticates its retroactive existence, like a mailman taking a signature of receipt for a package.

When we engage with the fixtures of our cultures and material realities, we too, authenticate them. This can be good or bad - when we communicate with each other, recognize each other, we authenticate each other too. Observing and being observed is a mutual act of validation for everyone involved. I see you seeing me seeing you.

I’m full of horseshit again. Read some more horseshit after the break.

Content Warning for this one: Pedophilia Mentions.

https://homestuck.com/story/422

There’s a lot to unpack in this sequence of pages, and I’m almost certainly going to miss a lot of it, but I’ll come back to stuff that I miss as it comes back up in later pages.

As a Crucible of Unlimited Potential, Skaia can become absolutely anything, and the shape that it will take on will be influenced by the actions of the players. But it isn’t anything yet. 

This is the second time in two pages that Nanna has brought up the light-darkness dichotomy of the forces at play in the Medium, and after just talking about the act of mutual authentication through mutual observation, my brain is screaming the words Hegelian Lens at me. Might go somewhere with that too.

I also wanna call attention to the name of the Medium. As a story about stories, it only makes sense that the name of Homestuck’s main otherworld should evoke the field used to propagate mass communication.

https://homestuck.com/story/423

I’ve always thought that it’s interesting that of the two forces in the Medium, the players have natural allies in the form of Prospit. The choice here is not to act on behalf of one or the other, the choice is between Action and Inaction. Not doing something is itself, doing something.

https://homestuck.com/story/427

You Can (Not) Redo.

Sburb relentlessly drives its players forward. If you attempt to go back, or stay where you are, you will be punished. No getting your parents back, no getting your planet back.

What’ll it be John? Advance or Advance?

https://homestuck.com/story/431

John is extremely resistant to being made to do things that he doesn’t want to do anyway, even by Narrators.

More thoughts about Cake and Baked Goods in Homestuck and in relation to John. The other main characters baking is associated with in Homestuck are all women - The Condesce, Meenah, Jane, Nanna - and baking in general is pretty strongly associated with women, moms, etc. I’ve always thought it was a little out of place amongst Dad’s other character traits, which are definitively masculine. Maybe it’s for exactly that reason - baking is culturally feminine.

Maybe John’s resistance to baked goods is because he’s uncomfortable receiving feminine affection (especially, but not only from his Dad). It’s like getting kisses from your Mom in public or other public displays of affection between men and the women in their lives, or even men and other men in their lives. John is certainly pretty clueless about affection from women when he receives it later in the story. On the other hand, he responds very well to masculine displays of affection, like the aloof but ebullient cards he gets from his Dad, or the one-upsmanship between him and Dave.

 (I’ll have to think some more about the capitalism thing from my other post.)

https://homestuck.com/story/433

More of Rose seeing enemies in every shadow. Then again, could it be Jasper’s fault that they’re in this mess?

https://homestuck.com/story/442

I think the fact that we jump to this point in the past suggests that Rose is probably reminiscing about this spot, going along with my theory that when the Narration is focusing on a character, it’s also giving us that character’s stream of consciousness - we’re experience what Rose is experiencing.

That probably goes a long way to excusing the kind of puzzling, irritating experience we have of our first minutes with John. Due to his tendency to get distracted by things and forget how things work, we have to suffer through his own inability to navigate his disorderly environment exactly the same way he does.

Oh, so that’s why this story gets compared to Ulysses.

It is Jaspers’ fault that they’re in this mess. My hypothesis gathers more data.

https://homestuck.com/story/444

The third of the prose poems. Drat. Got to Dave’s Poem before I even had the chance to write about Rose’s Poem. Guess we’ll come back to this one later later.

https://homestuck.com/story/445

I’ve almost certainly missed a few of these gags by now but “Left him hanging long enough” is one of the jokes that Homestuck reproduces over and over again. Homestuck reproduces itself frequently, like variations on a theme. Its self-referential nature could be called incestuous, as it turns one-off gags into recurring gags.

https://homestuck.com/story/448

While Bro and Dirk are both definitely irony ninjas where Dave is just performing irony to get his Bro’s approval, I think all the irony is an effort to distance themselves from the fact that they really do sincerely enjoy the things they’re “ironically” into. That too, is probably ironic.

Unfortunately, the actual subject matter of Bro’s interests, while innocuous in a vacuum, are still extremely inappropriate to leave out where a thirteen year old can have access to them. Bro probably isn’t a pedophile, but between the martial education, and the uncomfortable degree to which he involves Dave in his sex life, his relationship with Dave recalls pederasty which is one of many, many links between Dirk, Bro, and the Classical Hellenes, and Monastic Shudo, a similar practice historically attested from their beloved Japan. (The term Platonic Relationship is called that because Plato is one of the first Greek Philosophers to argue that maybe it would be better for students’ education if they weren’t also sexually involved with their mentors? Or so the story goes.)

I may have a bit of a vendetta against Bro Strider, which probably has at least a little to do with the fact that, when I first read Homestuck, I got fooled into thinking he was kind of awesome, and it wasn’t until I was able to deal with my own childhood abuse and the fact that I had been indoctrinated with a lot of the very same toxic ideas bro inculcated in Dave that I was able to realize that Bro Strider is kind of a horrible guardian, so I have a sort of special ire directed at this character. Maybe I’m afraid in another life, I could have grown up to be that kind of creep. I’m glad I didn’t.

https://homestuck.com/story/449

All throughout this section, the narration suggests that Dave is both subconsciously aware that his Bro’s pasttimes make him uncomfortable, but trying to soothe himself by affirming them. So, in spite of my sharing some youthful confusion with Dave, the Narrative at least communicates to us from the very beginning that something is off about Bro.

https://homestuck.com/story/452

To interrupt my dark and brooding reverie, please enjoy some Skate 3 Glitches.

I guess here’s a good place to note that I am going to be using the #personal stuff hashtag to denote when a post contains me alluding to my own dark and troubled past.

https://homestuck.com/story/457

The password is six letters long, and based on the fact that it’s the most awesome thing that it could be, I have no doubt that it’s Strider.

https://homestuck.com/story/465

Yup.

https://homestuck.com/story/466

:)

It warms the cockles of me heart that Dave’s first inclination when he starts to flip the fuck out is to reach out to John Egbert.

https://homestuck.com/story/484

8^y

https://homestuck.com/story/485

Remember that one-upsmanship I was talking about? Any chance Dave and John get around each other, they talk each other down. I’m not sure if Andrew was saying anything about Toxic Masculinity at the time. I expect, like a lot of us, he didn’t have those words on his mind in 2009, but that’s textbook toxic masculinity, and I think when viewed as a complete work, Dave and John’s growth out of it is a sign of healthy maturation. Build each other up, boys, don’t tear each other down. In this life, we’re all we’ve got, and you owe it to each other.

https://homestuck.com/story/503

Leveling up is one of those weird things about Roleplaying Games that I didn’t realize until some point in the last two years is kind of an integral fixture of them. Overcoming hardships permanently makes you stronger in games that have an experience-level feature in them, and once you’re strong enough to beat a challenge once, you’re almost always strong enough to overcome that challenge in the future.

It’s a kind of storytelling that on closer examination is weirdly propagandistic, but it’s actually all over media. It’s pretty rare for a story to say “When you overcome a challenge, good job. You will have to overcome that same challenge again and again - maybe every day of your life.” The interesting thing, and I might come back to this, is that I think Homestuck actually takes this latter approach. Exactly the same emotional struggles they begin the story with are the ones they spend all 8000 pages of Homestuck agonizing over, and these characters will probably spend their entire lives wrestling with the baggage of their youth.

Suffering and toil is the fate of humankind, I suppose.

https://homestuck.com/story/518

Surrounded by Idiots.

https://homestuck.com/story/538

Saw is a story about a serial killer who subjects his victims to gruelling trials catered to make them face their own fatal flaws and emerge changed into better people, which is a lot like authorial scorn, which Andrew describes thusly in the commentary for Vriska’s introduction: “It's not as ill-willed as it might sound, but more of a universal principle of storytelling that for things to be interesting, harsh outcomes must befall those you create, in response to which they may thrive or fail. Which to the casual observer may read as hate.“. Lord English and Caliborn bear visual similarity to Jigsaw’s creepy puppet avatars, and serve as instruments of Andrew’s Authorial Scorn. Bro reproduces the same kind of creator’s hatred that Lord English bears toward all of Paradox Space, and reproduces it for the dubious benefit of his ward - Dave is to overcome the challenges thrust upon him in order to become strong.

https://homestuck.com/story/571

Dave does not care for being watched.

https://homestuck.com/story/588

If Dave’s first instinct for when he’s uncomfortable is to go talk to his friends, his second instinct is to attack.

https://homestuck.com/story/625

I don’t remember where I read it originally, it’s too far away in the past, but each of the items in the Rocket Pack is representative of one of John’s friends. The Cinderblock Dave, the Flower Pot Jade, the Violin Rose. John’s friends, his connections and bonds (Blood) tie him down and prevent him from indulging his most impulsive behaviors (Breath).

https://homestuck.com/story/631

In addition to Mad Science (or perhaps as an aspect thereof) John demonstrates remarkable lateral thinking.

https://homestuck.com/story/635

Alchemy has helped me get my thoughts in gear on a subject I glossed over the other day - the way the characters’ personality traits and objects fill the background radiation of the comic. In a way, the same thing is going on when the characters produce all kinds of neat shit from the odds and ends around their house as is going on when Sburb populates itself with symbols from the characters domestic lives. 

Clowns become a threatening symbol throughout all of Homestuck, basically because there are a bunch in John’s house from a Doylist perspective. From a Watsonian perspective, Sburb seems, through the vehicle of destiny, to deliberately latch onto things from the players’ lives that will help them to contend with their anxiety and trauma. John has bad dreams about clowns, and seems to conceptualize himself as a clown in his self-critical estimation of himself. Maybe even as a Dark Mirror of his aspirations to be an entertainer? Is a Circus Clown a funhouse mirror version of a stage magician? I don’t have a follow up to that question, but it makes me think. If you checked out the essay from Malo I linked earlier, you might recognize some other things that John is afraid of which characterize his session, like his alleged fear of heights, and his anxiety about confronting his Dad.

I think that’s all for this evening. Another 200 pages down.

Cam signing off, alive and not alone.

#homestuck #liveblogging #commentary #authentication #validation #irony #personal stuff #authorial scorn

[tanoraqui]

ahh can you post which character goes with which handle? i think i've puzzled out most of them but i can't figure out which ones are lan xichen, lan wangji, or jiang yanli :D also who is grieflessAspirant bc that is a /very/ good name

fair question. @animatedamerican, too. An explanation (also I’ve tweaked a couple of the names):

YunmengJiang:

grieflessAspirant [GA] ectoPatriarch [EP] - Wei Wuxian “griefless” in reference to the translation of wuxian, “no envies”; “grief” can mean both “sorrow” and “grudge”, both of which he lacks (or at least tries very hard to never show). “aspirant” meaning “a person who has ambitions to achieve something”, with fairly positive, hopeful connotations?  Then the Burial Mounds, the Yiling Patriarch, and the change to something wholy outside the DNA-based structure of the others, representative of WWX’s inherently rule-breaking nature; “ecto” as allusion to our one and only ectoBiologist as well as, of course, ghostly ectoplasm

trivenomCommandant [TC] - Jiang Cheng Sandu Shengshou, “master of the three poisons”, natch. “Commandant” specifically means “officer in charge of a particular force or institution“, which, idk, feels good for Jiang Sect

aqueousConcord [AC] - Jiang Yanli someone in this family had to get an allusion to water. previously achieveConcord but I think “concord” alone is good - “agreement or harmony between people or groups”

GusuLan:

chevalierAlight [CA] - Lan Wangji Hanguang-jun, “light-bearing lord”, natch - but specifically, “alight” means glowing himself and “chevalier” is a chivalrous man and member of certain orders of knighthood - very fitting

gardeningTruth [GT] - Lan Xichen “gardening” as allusion to Zewu-jun, which means, like, “lord of the overflowing garden”?? I’m a little unclear. Also gardening is a classic Homestuck thing, see: Jade. “Truth” - even now, I’m considering changing it to “Tranquility”, but that feels kinda overlappy with JYL, and “truth” sounds nicely profound, and has that good good contrast with guile...

LanlingJin

ascendantGold [AG] - Jin Zixuan listen I unironically like this boy but you know he’s gonna put “gold” in his name and you know he’s gonna put something about being the best. Other considerations were “apexGold” and “acmeGold” (and a bunch of other stuff, but not repeating letter combos took precedence.) If the characters were Alternian/Beforan trolls, the Jins would probably be cerulean, and JZX would get constant grief for his handle suggesting that he’s a yellow - and it’d be ENTIRELY his own fault.

transcendingGuile [TG] - Jin Guangyao ngl this is one of my favorites. Is he transcending past guile, into honesty, hard work, etc? Or is he an embodiment of guile, transcending social structures, discrimination, etc? Well, the latter, but gee you could sure mistake it for the former.

accomplishedTenacity autonomousTenacity [AT] - LuoQingyang (”Mianmian”) sometimes I’m just picking a name I think the person would choose for themselves at age 12 or so - and, in this case, later change when she ditches Jin Sect. These are things Mianmian is, or certainly should be proud of: her tenacity (standing up for WWX, ably becoming a rogue cultivator), her accomplishments (skilled cultivator, socially able, etc), and later her independence.

gayApostle ghastlyApostate [GA] - Mo Xuanyu “gay” as in “happy”, you guys! Totally! “Apostle” as in one of the 12 disciples of Jesus Christ, “apostate” as “one who denounces a religious or political belief or principle”. Changed upon his expulsion from Carp Tower, of course. “Ghastly” to describe both his state of apostacy and as reference to the undead.

QingheNie

crimsonCutlass [CC] - Nie Mingjue Chifeng-zun, “red blade master”, natch. I feel like, when making up alternate titles for people in AUs, NMJ’s is the one I always most just leave as-is? But that’s because it’s one of the most badass as-is, so...

agnosticArtisan [AA] - Nie Huaisang I was trying very hard to figure out where in this set I could get some variation on “gnostic”, bc it actually shows up twice in Homestuck - gnosticGardener, tipstyGnostalgic. At the same time, I was digging desperately through synonyms for “ignorant”, “uncertainty”, etc, for our favorite Headshaker...when I remembered that “agnostic” literally means “without knowledge.” So! “Artisan” for the fans and other artistic endeavors, of course - though note that it’s not “artist” - an artisan is “a worker in a skilled trade, especially one that involves making things by hand.” High-stakes vengeful politics is a skilled trade, right?

QishanWen

gentlemanGallant ghostGeneral [GG] - Wen Ning my poor sweet child who is polite and kind (and little bit ruthless), and wanted to live a life that was brave, heroic, chivalrous (ie, gallant)...

tempestuousAsclepiad [TA] - Wen Qing just apt, I think? “Tempestuous” for her willingness - nay, yearning - to fucking throttle you (”characterized by strong and turbulent or conflicting emotion”); “Asclepiad” for how she will only do this once you’re no longer legally her patient. Probably.

Yi City

capriciousThanologist [CT] / [Anonymous] - Xue Yang “thanologist” from Greek Thanos, meaning death - “one who studies death.” Full credit to Xue Yang, the man put his work in studying and developing this shit. “Capricious” because, well...yeah. (Also see: terminallyCapricious, ie, Gamzee.)

consummateGentility [CG] - Xiao Xingchen altogether, “complete or perfect social superiority as demonstrated by polite, refined, or respectable manners, behavior, or appearances”. I mean...isn’t he just? I considered a change to “contriteGentility” after the Baixue Temple massacre, but ultimately decided the constancy of consummate was more important.

gelidConfidant [GC] - Song Lan “gelid” meaning icy or cold, reference to him being called “the winter frost” (yes I DID try to figure out something about the summer breeze for XXC, but it didn’t work.) For “confidant”, I wanted something about Song Lan’s loyalty. I’m not entirely satisfied with “a person with whom one shares a secret or private matter, trusting them not to repeat it to others“, but, well...at least it’s bitterly ironic once his tongue is cut out?

tiresiasThieves [TT] - A-Qing Tiresias from The Illiad is the ORIGINAL (in Western mythology) Blind Seer trope, which of course is perfect for the blind girl who is the only one who sees clearly even once she IS blinded, not to mention dead. As for “thieves”, well. This Tiresias certainly does.

#Anonymous #homestuck #mdzs #the untamed #coming up with all of these was VERY fun #it's a character analysis game AND a word game! #i hope people also had fun figuring them out #my fic

[bladekindeyewear]

HS^2 bloggin’ mainline 2020-03-12

I have been told only a few things about the upd8 that just landed, over Discord by two people:

upd19 feat. 4,901,157 read it. now. note: the featuring note is accurate if in a different base than what you might be expecting

What the fuck does that even mean.

Okay Pretty good chapter.

...from another friend who VERY dislikes HS^2?  Oh shit.

I also glimpsed a post that may or may not have been about Homestuck at all at the top of my Tumblr feed for an instant that said “YES YES YES YES YES” in huge bold print.  I have no idea whether to be excited or nervous.

Okay, it’s not a Bonus update... let me comb through from an earlier page to be careful not to get a spoilerlook at the pagecount...

...huh.  That seems... like a conversation that would be up my alley, but not necessarily unique so far or worth all this crowing about.  I thought we were about to get Dirk-aliens with a full Horschestra backing... are we getting something else?

> CHAPTER 6. A Conversation Regarding Relevance

Hmmmmmmmm.  With the contrast between their reactions and this ominous buildup, there’s got to be a serious fun-twist coming.  Right?  --I’ll stop with that talk for the moment though.

space is vast. an unproductive statement, almost a tautology. [...]

Alright, that and the starry background are riffing the fuck off Star Trek.  Nice homage to Andrew’s roots.

the lives of the many are far too volatile and instinct-driven

Alt!Callie what the fuck are you doing.  This is intentional now.  You can’t play this off as “what’s a Star Trek”.

tautologies are, in general, reserved for stories. for narrative device. for finding new and inventive ways to tell an audience that which they already know.

God damnit she’s still doing it

neither of us ever able to convince the other of the righteousness of our stance. we were never meant to agree. it isn’t in our blood.

Blah blah overanalyzing classpect blah

when they scoff at my tautology ‘space is vast’, what do they really know? nothing. as far as any of them have experienced, space does not exist.

It’s still nice to see some real personality leak through on Alt!Callie.  We definitely know from her other self that she can develop quite a relatable and colorful one.  Have the years helped?

> ==>

dramantic pouse... ........

Also,

-look at that collar.  Damn, Callie, that is a collar

very few have stood and looked into the abyss, the true gulf of nothingness that spreads out around the single point of consciousness adrift in a constellation. all the combined weight of sentient endeavour would quail underneath that sheer, irresistible truth. the realization that they are so small, that the universe cares about their puny lives so very little. sitting in the glowing light of the stars this becomes even more apparent

In the official aspect quiz I never took the time to analyze, the aspects were put on a wheel where Space was a neighbor to Void, if I recall correctly.  I wonder how much those aspects engender feelings of goddamnit I’m doing it again aren’t I

...

are we out of orange juice?

Yesss let more personality Alt!Callie bleed through, more of it~

Wait, does Alt!Callie even taste through Jade?  Isn’t this remote control?  Is she vicariously drawing pleasure from Jade’s not-just-meat-or-candy mostly-human taste buds or?

> ==>

JADE: are you talking to me? JADE: because if you are i would like to remind you that i hate!! orange juice!!

OH FUCK YES!!! SHE’S IN THERE AND AWAKE!!! SHE STILL HAS AT LEAST ENOUGH AGENCY TO BE PRESENT AND ARGUE WITH CALLIE! YESSSSSS

no you don’t.

JADE: well i guess i never really had a strong opinion on it before JADE: but now i cant stand it!! JADE: its all you drink!

i like the pulp.

QUIT INADVERTANTLY FORCING SHIT ON JADE WITH NARRATIVESPEAK GIVE HER A BIT OF LEEWAY ALT!CALLIE YOU CONTROLLING--

JADE: its my body and i dont want orange juice! JADE: i hate pulp, and i didnt just make that up to spite you JADE: who wants strings in their juice?

i do.

JADE: ughhhhhhhhh

I have had friends hopefully fantasize about and/or therapeutically roleplay this exact situation with Jade breaking through and arguing with Alt!Callie’s control to make this all a fair bit more palatable but I didn’t dare to hope we’d get even THIS much

Maybe the HS^2 authors DO care about not leaving us wallowing in hopeless witness to the characters’ constant torture and existential turbosuffering!!!! :#D

i realize that jade’s situation is less than ideal from a characterization perspective, but i still politely point out that nobody likes a whiner.

Fuck you, this isn’t CALIBORN you’re trying to repress you asshole!  Leave Jade some AGENCY!!!!!  She deserves it!!

JADE: fuck you rude calliope inside my head!

YES EXACTLY

JADE: why dont you try being possessed by the spirit of some other version of a good friend of yours, and floated around a spaceship full of people you love JADE: unable to affect anything or say hello to anyone! JADE: then tell me about whiners!

i killed my brother and consumed him.

JADE: sounds like a you problem

Compromise and give her some agency finally come on compromise and give her some agency you red-text twatwaffle

i suggest to the witch that i have spent untold eons in the void between universes, waiting for the moment i would be needed to prevent the dissipation of reality as we know it. her appeals to emotion will not help her. i will remain unmoved.

Oh god damnit.

JADE: well i had to watch my boyfriend and my brother die in front of me on a tiny scaled version of a world that i shrunk for them! JADE: and then spend the next three years talking to myself, wracked with guilt that id killed them!

Oh. God. Damnit.  This had better not be where the Suicide trigger warning was coming from.  Are there going to be any characters left who DIDN’T emerge from this mess feeling suicidal?!?  (I mean if there were any understandable case it would be three years alone on the golden ship Jade but-- I mean COME ON, we have to discuss that in our FIRST GLIMPSE at her since the epilogues?!?)

> ==>

i remind the witch that my time was in the void, which is far darker and lonelier [...]

Oh fuck you don’t compare suffering as an excuse to COMPLETELY body-enslave and squash the agency of someone when you probably don’t have to.  You’re just doing what’s COMFORTABLE alt!Callie admit it.  There’s a way you could give her some leeway, I’m almost positive.

JADE: even if i had the powers of a first guardian, my brain still worked in modules of human pattern recognition! JADE: three years is a long time for a human teenager, i dont care how many of her molecules are made of a god!

(i love it when jade talks smart, that bit of the epilogues was a treat too, plz reveal more of the big brain on jade)

It seems Jade can’t see or quite understand the full import of there being a “narrative”.  Or THINKS she cant, because she still says:

JADE: your voice is impossible to read and i cant see your face

If she’s “reading” alt!Callie’s remarks, that means she’s breaking through to understand the narrative to SOME extent.  She might be one of the ones who learns to do that a little more and better in the future, especially with alt!Callie almost unintentionally training her to see it.

> ==>

Oh, good.  So A!C’s not above being considerate.  That’s a step in the right direction.

> ==>

D’aww, Jade conceding and trying to empathize like her usual self.  I appreciate it.  :)  --but Alt!Callie’s definitely in the wrong here.

JADE: but i think it is a very natural thing to be silly when you are used to being able to control your own body, but now cant

i will allow that, yes.

Thanks.  Learn some damned reason.

jade smiles. dave and karkat will always be a source of pain for her, a low ache somewhere in her center of gravity, but she is happy for them. she knows that there is really no other alternative for how to be. they chose each other over her, and they always will. they are the two people who matter to her the most in every universe, and that will not change, no matter how much she wishes it would, no matter how--

JADE: do you actually know that?

pardon me?

Oh, shit.

JADE: do you actually know that im doomed to pine over dave and karkat across every iteration of reality? JADE: like, can you actually see that? JADE: because youre a space player, like i am. JADE: i know that you are more powerful than me, but i dont think you can see other timelines any better than i can JADE: so i think you are just being dramatic JADE: for the “audience”, whatever the heck that means

i experience a moment of unease as jade looks at me. keeping her out of my thoughts is proving to be more difficult than i had first assumed it would be.

That’s a damned interesting question.  I was giving the narrative the benefit of the doubt, but given everything the Epilogues warned us about when it came to the narrators and alt!Callie’s occasional slips into her own bias, I really should have known better.

i had begun confident that i could keep her consciousness sleeping peacefully inside the shell of her body, tamed and quiescent, but she has proved to be more irascible than i initially gave her credit for.

JADE: heheh JADE: i have never been particularly tamable, and my consciousness is huge!

This might end up playing out more like my friend’s Jade-breaks-out roleplays than I initially assumed.  (What does she mean “huge consciousness” though?  Superpowered due to part-First-Guardian, like she alluded earlier in the conversation?  That never got much play before, so it’s great to see that potential realized here a bit...)

> ==>

...I’m a fucking idiot.  Of COURSE “huge consciousness” and the whole line around it was just an unsubtle double-entendre.  A small part of me actually wondered if it was and dismissed it as a clumsy reading in an instant.  How stupid am I?  Jade is the best.

If only this sort of thing worked on Cherubs.

> ==>

Yeah.  It really doesn’t.

...Alt!Callie, you are a fucking war-criminal for bottling all these double-entendres up where none of the others can appreciate them.

> ==>

JADE: you are a pretty tough crowd, evil callie JADE: but yes, i can hear most of what you are thinking to yourself JADE: it took a little while to separate it from my own thoughts, just like it did with dirk JADE: because thats what he was doing the whole time, wasnt it? JADE: controlling our thoughts JADE: making us believe things we never would, things he thought we SHOULD believe

Fucking excellent.  She’s definitely training herself on this shit.  The more people who have a harder time getting fooled by this nonsense the better.

jade knows all of this, i don’t have to tell her. she is a very bright girl, and even if she didn’t have partial access to my thoughts, she is good at compiling data and using it to fill in gaps. as she herself had rather licentiously mentioned, her brain is quite large.

C:

and all of these reasons are why i know i can count on her to be reasonable and realistic about her situation. i need a body to continue interfacing with this timeline, and her body is the only one that will do.

Dammit.  Trying to get her to logic her way back into keeping Alt!Callie in complete control.  That’s a tactic that will probably work.  :(

what about [kanaya], jade? she is a space player, it is true, but her powers are nothing compared to yours. for one, she isn’t god tier, and for two, she is dead. a living dead, but dead nonetheless.

Hm.  Are you saying she maybe has less relevance, less of an effect on her surroundings because she spent some of her “cred” on unconventional partial resurrection?  To the extent where she’d make a less influential vessel?  Hmm.

For that to even matter, you have to be planning to use Jade’s Space powers too.  Taking a far more active role in things than narrative beacon.

and a sylph’s specializations lie on a different end of the spectrum from my own. a witch is a far closer match.

!!!!!

Sounds like details of the classpect system that we don’t know will have relevance in HS^2, and we’re indeed gonna possibly get some actual new, clearer details about the system Andrew invented unlike the dearth of new info the Epilogues brought us.  That is... promising.

no, jade understands and sympathizes with my assurance that her body, and her body alone, will do for my purposes.

JADE: um...no i dont!

YES.  Jade is now officially immune to absolute command! :D :D :D

she does. after all, she would not wish this sort of state of being on anyone else, and especially not on one of her friends. jade may have undergone a lopsided number of narrative hardships in her life, but at least she is used to them. why spread that suffering to another?

What the fucking shit???  You’re using that on her?  You think it’ll WORK?!

jade understands and accepts her place in the story, which has always been to enable events to play out around her, just as it has been mine.

..........yeah Jade’s gonna bust the fuck out on the very next page, isn’t she.

What the fuck is Alt!Callie thinking, here?  Wasn’t the other Calliope the one to let us know that the Witch is one of the most active classes there is??  ...what exactly does a Witch officially do anyway, for Alt!Callie to think saying such a thing wasn’t dead wrong?  This sounds MUCH more like the sort of statement someone might make after breezing through Homestuck and confusing the old Jade (cough) for the person she grew up into.

And the fact that you’re phrasing this as a narrative command to try and make her forcibly THINK this way deserves you a smack in the non-literal depictive face.  Let’s see if you get one:

> ==>

Oh wow, no smack yet?!  That’s some restraint!

because what is a story, truly? nothing but a series of misadventures and connections, actions spurring reactions, tumbling into one another, over and over and over. with so many competing interests, clearly the story cannot account for all perspectives, for all threads? it would be laughable, childish, even selfish, to demand that they do.

in other words, not everyone will achieve a happy ending. this is a truth that jade had come to grips with a long time ago.

JADE: wait. JADE: stop. JADE: why are you saying all of this?

Ohh.  Because she still had even MORE smackworthy stuff left to say, to make the smack even SMACKIER, didn’t she.  Alt!Callie you asshole.  If this gets you kicked out of her almost entirely and jeopardizes the crew as Jade struggles to combat Dirk’s narrative influence on her OWN, then I’m fucking blaming YOU!  Do you realize how horrible it’ll be if Dirk gets to almost singlehandedly write the whole story around her and the others for the first section of HS^2 with only one or two characters aware and trying to mentally avert it??  We already TRIED that in the Epilogues!  It was awful!

jade’s body is my vessel, and it is through this realization that she will understand her true role in the story. her true relevance.

Go fuck yourself, Alt!Callie.  Read the audience a bit!

if i released my hold on her consciousness, there would be no guarantee that i would be allowed in again. therefore i cannot permit her the control of herself that she so desperately craves, and she understands that.

THAT’S your reasoning your used-to-surpressing-Caliborn ignorant--!??

JADE: wait. so...you could give me my body back, and then just hop back in when you need to?

in theory, yes.

JADE: then what the hell callie!

because i don’t trust you to cooperate when the time comes.

MotherfuckerTheMusical.mp4

(or real existing equivalent that’s just off the top of my head)

JADE: why not? JADE: i thought you said i was a reasonable girl with a huge brain!

you are, to an extent.

she is. but the truth of the matter remains that humans are capricious and emotional. and even jade herself can admit that she hasn’t been the most...committed example of her species in the last few years.

Oh my fucking god.  I know they’re trying to make this more satisfying when she actually DOES take control in a few panels, but, Alt!Callie, seriously, get more on your other self’s level!!!

> ==>

Yes, please >:O some more

moving from lover to lover, job to job, interest to interest. over the last few years jade had found herself listless, unable to settle and unwilling to commit to anything or anyone. she knows there’s nothing wrong with that on a moral level, but on a personal level she’s always believed that she could be more, could do better. be better. and now, because of this, she realizes that sacrifices must be made.

and that she, as a space player, is uniquely built for sacrifice.

JADE: yeah JADE: i guess youre right JADE: i have been such a silly little slut! JADE: hey callie

yes, jade?

JADE: oh my god, whats that!!!!

You are so fucking screwed Alt!Callie.

this space is utterly under my control. jade could control it too, if she had any access to her own powers. but with my grip around her cortex, there is no chance of that.

(Wait, there’s an extent to which this space is “real” and not imaginary?  Or does holding her space powers in check also mean keeping her imaginary space powers in check?)

Anyway, here comes the smack.  And, though Alt!Callie deserves this, I hope Dirk isn’t let in too often amidst the others as a result.

> ==>

Yup, poising to pounce...

> ==>

I thought there was a weird infinity symbol underneath them but it’s just two spotlights and a shadow cast by her head.

and here i make my first mistake.

No you made your first mistakes WAAAY earlier in this conversation.  And what you did to Jade in general.  She’s a hero/player for a reason, she doesn’t take stuff lying down forever.

but bringing her into a place where we can both physically manifest has left me, foolishly, vulnerable.

First, physically manifest?  This isn’t pure imaginationspace?  And second, she’s going to blame her polite concession to Jade for this and hold on even tighter the next time, isn’t she.  God damnit, not looking forward to that.  Alt!Callie won’t learn her lesson til the end, will she?  :(

her fingers tear at my throat, trying to find purchase. she won’t be able to kill me here, but it is certainly unpleasant, and not to mention slightly repetitive. we just saw this in the previous chapter, although this particular fight will not end as amorously as the last one did. so don’t get your hopes up.

JADE: who! JADE: are you talking to!

I really hope Jade ends up with full narrative powerOOOOOHHHH FUCK THEY COULD GO FOR THAT HUH

Dirk was able to become an Ultimate Self in his own body because it was the uniting of an irrepressible “self” that he always unbreakably represented.  The others had more trouble.

But Jade

has a BIG PART-GOD BRAIN as reinforced in the narrative repeatedly!!

Meaning that later, SHE could Ultimate Self without ANY PHYSICAL CONSEQUENCE.  :D

I was hoping Jade would end up with full narrative-dictating-and-reading power when she wants to use it, at some point, but I might’ve been aiming too low! :D :D :D

Yaaaaaaaaaaaay

Now all the playfully-horny omnipotent Jade fanfics are true, what that totally isn’t part of why I love this go ahead and admit she doesn’t deserve it

> ==>

Yesss flashy gif struggle against control!  (Though, not as elegant as one of Andrew’s might’ve been. Gotta say.)

> ==>

Blinky-eyes about to resolve normal-Jade-colored....!

> ==>

Wait, what?  I thought Jade was about to snap in and--

during the ship’s trip through space, there have been numerous experiments; modifications to the nutrition output of the various machines designed to create sustenance for the various species on board. i myself have been content with orange juice and synthetic proteins, but dave and roxy have both expressed longing for various ‘earth snacks’, and so the trials and errors began.

What the fuck?  I don’t even know where this is going if it’s punways.

Is there like a dog treat somewhere that’s gonna push her over the edge?  Where is this headed even.

> ==>

Wh...

WHa??????

the results were mixed. as roxy told us in a previous chapter, alchemized food all sort of tastes the same, although the visuals really help to bring about the flavor. and at the end of the day, isn’t it the journey that is more important than the destination? the stories you tell as you create the strangely flavored nutritional paste?

JADE: ????????????

Um??  What’s even going on.

so far, everyone’s favorite attempt has been a vaguely peanut-butter and chocolate flavored creation called "Rices'". nobody eats them really. they just sit in a bowl on the counter.

i’m not actually sure what the witch is trying to accomplish here.

Is Jade trying to humorously gross Alt!Callie out of her body with a candy she doesn’t like or?  But, “suicide threat”? Why joke--

JADE: you dont? JADE: really?

i don’t know what she is trying to accomplish, because surely she would not be doing what it appears she is trying to do. making such a meaningless threat.

JADE: meaningless? JADE: do you even know anything about the body you stole? JADE: shouldnt you have run some sort of psychic physical before you possessed it? JADE: its definitely what i would have done!

Oh SHIT.  You mean Jade has the same peanut allergy JOHN does?!?

> ==>

jade must know that i am well-aware of her family-wide peanut allergy. a story thread that has been extremely important and weighed in on in multiple parts of the narrative. how could i have forgotten such a key detail?

...yes, she totally forgot, but more than that.

I’m betting John is the ONLY one with a peanut allergy.  That Jade is USING that fact to bluff like hell.  :D

(Allergies aren’t usually inherited that way you alien!)

there is nothing remotely just or heroic about dying from self-imposed anaphylactic shock in the throes of a childish tantrum. at the most i’ll get a relaxing few minutes of sleep.

Is Alt!Callie bluffing now?  Even a resurrecting death could throw her off.

> ==>

FUCK YES JADE.

JADE: do you really want to risk it?

what are you talking about, jade? i just said--

FUCK YES JADE, BE A HUGE WITCH

(i say in the most witch-connotatively and non-classpect-related way)

JADE: i dont know, callie JADE: ive never really understood the rules that govern the death of a god tier, have you? JADE: it seems pretty arbitrary from where im standing JADE: who makes the decision whether or not something is heroic or just?

...that’s unclear. but it certainly isn’t you.

JADE: right, of course not JADE: but are you so confident that youre a good guy? JADE: are you sure that the alpha timeline WANTS you to be here?

...what.

JADE: youve done some stuff, callie JADE: im only saying you shouldnt be so quick to assume that me killing you wouldnt be just JADE: and that taking my own life to do it wouldnt be heroic

Even with JUST this one fucking situation Alt!Callie put her in, throwing off her control forever by dying would be shortsighted but HELLA JUST.  What Alt!Callie is doing to her is a crime.

Oh shit!?!?

> [S] ==>

What is this, HTML5?  *clicks play*

...for a second, I thought this was gonna launch into a huge thing with that clock ticking song from the Felt album.

Having Rose and Dirk’s colors competing here really reinforces that... Prospit vs Derse vibe that was feeding the whole this-is-the-basis-for-the-game’s-structure-and-the-birth-of-Paradox-Space theory more earlier.

> ==>

i don’t let the witch manipulate me. i refuse to falter in the face of her whispers. without my careful planning and swift action, the prince would have taken full control over this timeline. none of my friends could even begin to imagine the turmoil.

In the end, you’re ignoring what’s right and brave in this instance to instead do something EXPEDIENT, to the exclusion of trust and compassion when things COULD work out just as well without taking the worst actions -- which is textbook villainous.

> ==>

JADE: they arent your friends!! JADE: you took them from me!

Now isn’t THAT a way to put it. :D :D :D

Alt!Callie is sinning almost as badly as Dirk, here.  Viewing everyone else as characters in a story, the only way she’s ever viewed “friends”, and her as the not-so-humble narrator doing what’s best for all of them.  If she’s going to win against Dirk -- or if that victory is going to MEAN anything -- she will HAVE to realize that she needs to be different.

JADE: you keep saying that youre doing all of this for my own good, but youre just lonely! JADE: i know you are, because so am i!

Ouch.

Will Alt!Callie force her to swallow it?

JADE: you said that being a space player is all about sacrifice JADE: well

> ==>

JADE: bet

...I guess she really might have an allergy.

> ==>

Aaaand the candy drops.  A W A K E ! ! ! !

Yaaaaay Jade is BACK and we’ll get to see even more of her!!!

...please tell me on the next page she grabs the candy, noms it, and mentions she doesn’t have a peanut allergy after all.  That would be sweet.

> ==>

...

Nope, you just leave us on a sad.  Dammit, why do you gotta be all adult and showin’ us both sides in a moment of triumph, HS^2.  Shucks.

Anyway, YAY JADE!  C:

I am happy by this, if slightly too emotionally-rollercoastered by the past 24-hours to give this the full-rejoicing it deserves.  That, and worried about the openings Dirk will get because of this... joy now for potential frustration later, even if Jade tries her best to let Alt!Callie back in in-time.

See y’all next time!  And, uhm.  I guess I’ll comment on whatever other asks I promised to comment on another less-eventful day.  Keep reminding me and holding me to it though!

#Homestuck #hs2 #Homestuck Liveblog #upd8 #Homestuck^2 #bladekindeyewear #blastyoboots #(yes the past 24-hours includes witnessing everyone's despair at realizing the president is going to get our family members virus-killed) #Jade Harley

[kaz-2y5--slytherin]

Title: Drunken confession 

Fandom: Homestuck 

Pairing: Karkat Vantas/Sollux Captor

Rating: Mature (underage drinking, cursing) 

Word count: 971

<Next chapter> 

A/N: I haven’t read the epilogs or pesterquest (honestly it’s been a long time since I read homestuck and this fic wasn’t even written recently). This is if Sollux had stayed on the meteor 

_________________________________

Chapter 1 

You are Karkat Vantas and you do not like to be woken up after only three hours of sleep. You debate staying in bed, but the knocking doesn’t stop. You hope whoever is in the midst of knocking a hole through your door has a really good reason or not even Gamzee will be able to stop you from murdering whoever is ruining your long-awaited nap.  

To your surprise Sollux is the one disturbing your slumber. “WHAT YOU WANT DOUCHEWAFFEL?”

“Ehehehe and here I was hoping for s0mething nice,” he hiccups, “well I guess you w0uldn’t be my kk if you didn’t curse at me.”

You smell the distinct odour of Lalonde’s favourite beverage, “ARE YOU DUNK CAPTOR!”

He has the nerve to look down bashfully and lie straight to your face, “n0, what makes you think I w0uld touch that human substance Lal0nde has stashed under her bed-thingy in a very inconspicu0u2 black box.”

“YEAH, RIGHT.” You can feel your blood boiling, “PROBABLY THE FACT THAT YOU REEK OF IT, SHITHEAD! WITH THE SLURRING YOU’RE EVEN HARDER TO UNDERSTAND YOU INCOMPETENT BUFFOON!” His only response is to rub his neck sheepishly. This makes you snap, “YOU GOT NOTHING TO SAY? NOT GONNA HAND ME ANOTHER LIE?” You sigh rubbing your temples in an attempt to ease your growing headache, “WHAT ARE YOU EVEN DOING HERE?” Since you´re awake now you might as well find out what he deemed important enough to disturb your well deserved rest.

He contorts his face into an expression of mock hurt and places a hand on his chest, “I can’t visit my fav0urite troll anym0re?”

“SINCE WHEN WAS I EVER YOUR FAVOURITE TROLL?” As if, you’re probably not even his second or third favourite troll, not with how close he has been getting with fish queen.

He has the audacity to pout. “Always, I thought we were best friends.” He wipes a fake tear from the corner of his eye.

Is he stupid? Wait you already know that he is. “BEST FRIEND? YOU PICKING UP HUMAN LINGO NOW? I’M NOT MEGIDO OR PEIXES YOU BRAINDEAD BULGESUCKER, GO FIND ANOTHER BEST FRIEND.” Your patience is running thin with him.

Your about to close the door when he blocks it with a hand. “N0, you’re kk. Beautiful w0nderful Karkat,” you’re surprised to see the soft smile that appears on his face.

Still bothered by him waking you up from your nap, you snap at him, “ARE YOU TRYING TO PISS ME OF? CAUSE OH BOY IT’S WORKING.”

He takes a step back and raises his palms in the universal sign for I come in peace. “To0 strong? What I mean is that y0u’re not that h0rrible,” he smirks, “some might even g0 so far as t0 say that you’re pitiable.” This throws you of your balance, did he just say pitiable?

He leans into your personal space, you take a step back. Is he flirting with you? He’s your best friend (yeah, yeah you know your being a hypocrite), but you’re not exactly pale for him. “ARE YOU PALE FOR ME? CAUSE WE’RE NOT GOING DOWN THAT ROAD, I’VE ALREADY GOT GAMZEE HE ISN’T AS MUCH AS A DOUCHEFUCKING GLOBETICKLING WASTE OF SPACE AS YOU ARE.” Gamzee might be a handful but you’re a faithful troll.

He retorts by taking another step forward, you hold your ground. “Wh0 said I wanted to take Makara’s place?” His cocky smirk makes you want to punch him, but you restrain yourself.

If he’s not flirting pale then what’s his game? “WHAT IN THE DOUCHEY FUCKSTENCH BULGE NIPPLE WHAT ARE YOU GETTING AT CAPTOR?” He tries to take a step more forward but ends up tripping over his own feet and grasps your shoulder for balance. You react instinctively by hooking your arm around his torso and pulling him flushed against your body to steady him. “ARE YOU REALLY SO INCOMPETENT THAT YOU CAN’T EVEN STAND ON YOUR OWN TWO FEET?”

“Excuse my inc0mpetence,” his words are dripping with sarcasm but soon turns soft, “at least I’m lucky enough t0 have you here t0 catch me when I fall.” You glance down at his face expecting to see a smirk but instead you are greeted by the same soft smile you were granted earlier. He turns his head to you a looks up like he’s trying to convey something of uttermost importance, but you’re unable to read him leaving you more confused than ever as to what his antics are. “You kn0w if it wasn’t for Lal0nde’s smelly beverage I wouldn’t be this h0nest with you.” Honest? He calls this being honest? He lied to you about drinking that stuff! You barely get to finish that thought before you feel his lips against yours.

Your eyes widen in surprise and in a matter of mere moment you’ve debated with yourself whether to push him away or kiss back. You almost give in, but the grim taste reminds you of his currently intoxicated state. He stumbles backwards surprised by your action and almost topples over at the loss of his support. “WE CAN’T DO THIS, YOU’RE NOT IN YOUR RIGHT MIND,” you turn your head trying to hide as you feel heat rise to your face.

“S0, you’re saying I can d0 it again when I haven’t been drinking?” You shot a glance towards him and see his smirk back full force. You make the choice that leaves you with the most of your dignity intact. You abscond.

<Next chapter>

#homestuck #fanfiction #solkat #posting my old fics #i needed this to come out of my writers block #i have two more of these unfinished fics #not sure if i'll ever write chapter two #sollux #sollux captor #karkat #karkat vantas #o

[homespork-review]

Homespork Act 4, Part 2: Flight of the Paradox Groans

BRIGHT: Remember Spades Slick being bizarrely aware he was in a comic, back in the Intermission? Buckle up, things are about to get even more fourth-wall-breaking. Appropriately, this starts by the comic focusing on an actual fourth wall, which activates to show...Andrew Hussie.

Hussie’s MS Paint avatar notices the audience watching him, laments that his side of the wall doesn’t have an off switch, and then recaps the first year of Homestuck.

Now, in all fairness: The recap is thorough, full of links, and explains things fairly well. It’s quite long, but given how much territory it has to cover I’m not sure it could be any shorter. So it does its job well, and it’s a boon if you’re getting lost with the plot.

As for the author insertion...on this occasion I don’t mind it. It comes across as tongue-in-cheek, but framed more as the author talking to the reader than as the author inserting himself into the narrative. It’s definitely very Homestuck.

Anyway, AH gets back to work, and after a couple of false starts we return to John!

John is still flying around with his jet pack. GC trolls him to offer him a world map of LOWAS and tell him she feels awful about killing him, although in literally the next line she tells him that technically he never even died so she doesn’t understand why he’s so upset. John understandably finds this disturbing. They have a brief nonsensical discussion about Jesus/Jegus, and then John agrees to go take a look at what’s on the other side of his Second Gate. Yes, on the advice of someone whose previous advice got him killed.

CHEL: Almost a shame we didn’t set up a Too Dumb To Live count, but then to be fair that was a separate timeline and he’s probably not thinking of it as something that “really” happened. This is supported by his later dialogue.

FAILURE ARTIST: The word Jegus is really popular in the Homestuck fandom, used far more often than it is in the canon. Gets quite annoying, in my opinion. Actually, a rather Jesus-like figure does appear, but he’s not called “Jegus”.

CHEL: Yeah, I think only Terezi, John, and Dave ever use the term, but it somehow became latched onto as an actual term used by trolls in general, even though in canon it isn’t.

BRIGHT: Fortunately, this time GC appears to be playing nice. John flies though the Second Gate and emerges...into LOLAR?

FAILURE ARTIST: Hussie does an amusing trick where he has what looks like a loading screen for a flash but it’s actually a still image eternally at 2%.

BRIGHT: Yes, it’s LOLAR. John promptly crashes into Rose’s house, smashing through a wall and into her bedroom, where Rose is still snoozing in her knitting pile. Apart from briefly being stuck upside down, he does not appear injured by this collision.

Rose has somehow slept through the commotion. John decides to let her rest and borrows her computer to talk to Dave.

The first one he talks to is actually Davesprite, who points out how moronic John was to listen to GC again. No arguments here! Then he explains how the Gate system works: Odd-numbered Gates, above players’ houses, lead to somewhere on their planets. Even-numbered Gates lead to other players’ planets, exiting over their houses. Normally they aren’t meant to go through even-numbered Gates until the houses are built up, so they don’t fall to their deaths, but fortunately John has a jetpack workaround. So far Davesprite is living up to his promise of being straightforward.

John realises he’s talking to Future Dave, and asks “do you think i could talk to the real dave for a second?”

...ouch, John.

Davesprite goes off on a tear, ranting that he is a real Dave — arguably the realest Dave, since he’s been running around LOHAC for months trying to get enough information to save everyone. John apologises sincerely.

CHEL: This won’t be the last we hear of this theme, though.

EB: i think i pissed off your future self. TG: what did you do EB: i said he wasn't the real dave. TG: ahahahahaha EB: i think i might have really hurt his feelings though! TG: pff TG: dont worry about it EB: why not? TG: cause i wouldnt give a shit TG: and hes me

BRIGHT: Not a hundred percent sure I believe Dave, there.

CHEL: Dave uses John to snoop around Rose’s room and get the captcha code for her journals. Classy, Dave. Not a SLAMMER point, however, as this does come back to bite him very soon.

Rose’s dreamself has awoken on Derse, the purple planet, and flies across to the opposite tower. Dave’s dreamself appears to be awake, sitting upright in his computer chair; the room is entirely an unsettling bloody red colour apart from the SBaHJ cartoons on the walls, and… oh shit, there’s Lil Cal again, now in a long purple nightdress and hopping around the room on his own. If Rose was having nightmares because of dreamself issues, I can only imagine how Dave’s nightmares must look. Rose throws a ball of yarn at Dave’s dreamself, alerting him, and causing the awake Dave to pass out.

Back in Rose’s room, it seems that Charles Barkley quote was not misattributed:

FAILURE ARTIST: Another SBaHJ reference in the book quote. Is that where Dave got it?

Still, I don��t recall this book ever coming up again. Just another item that seems like a Chekhov's Gun but isn’t.

CHEL: John feels guilty about opening his birthday gift from Rose, but reasons that it’s technically now his anyway, so he does, finding another bunny, this one black and filthy-looking except for the pristine knitted purple patches repairing it, though its shape is eerily familiar.

The gift in this box is a resurrection. I used your present to thread life anew into a tattered heirloom. As long as I can remember, its black, greasy appendages have been tethered limply to its ratty, porous carriage. Too delicate to wash, too dear to discard. I used to love this rabbit. Now he's yours. I trust you'll find this to be adequately sentimental. Happy birthday.

Oh my gosh, awwwwww. Even if you don’t ship them romantically how can you not love their interactions? Definitely one of the comic’s strong points. Also I need to go hug my childhood teddy bear.

John puts the bunny back in the box again and the box in his sylladex, freeing Casey the salamander while he’s at it. And let’s just take a minute to feel utter horror because dead John still had Casey in his sylladex, so the best option is that she died too, and the worst is that we have an And I Must Scream situation on for a baby salamander. Gah.

FAILURE ARTIST: Thanks, I’d never thought of that and I never want to again.

You aren't actually sure if she is a girl though. You don't even know if salamanders can be girls. Aren't they hermaphrodites or something?

CHEL: No, for the record. Though some frogs can switch from one to the other.

FAILURE ARTIST: Casey is very popular as a name for an OC child of John (often having Rose as the mother).

CHEL: John answers Rose’s Pesterchum, upon which GA is half-heartedly sending antagonistic messages. John answers on Rose’s account, saying that Rose is asleep, which GA takes for Human Sarcasm, prompting John to pretend to be Rose.

GA: I Should Figure Out How The Viewport Feature Of This Application Works GA: So I Can See What Such A Primitive Creature Looks Like TT: haha, well i know what you guys look like. TT: you look kind of like... TT: howie mandel from little monsters.

Wait, how does he know? Am I forgetting a point at which he saw them?

BRIGHT: I always assumed that he was just goofing around and his guess happened to land in the right ballpark, but thinking about it, I’m not sure the kids ever express surprise at the trolls’ appearance.

CHEL: John, pretending to be Rose, talks about how awesome John is.

GA: He Is Either The Leader Of Your Party Or You Hold Whatever The Human Equivalent Of Mating Fondness For Him Is

CHEL: Both. Both is good!

FAILURE ARTIST: Knowing what we do of troll culture later this is an odd statement. Heck, it’s just an odd statement. Maybe this is why people think trolls don’t do friendship.

CHEL: John apparently confuses GA by saying it’s because Rose is thoughtful and John appreciates his gift, and suggests GA talk to John.

TT: why don't you pick the time that will make the most complicated mess out of everything imaginable?

GA sounds very annoyed, and leaves, intending to have the conversation with John that she had previously. We see her, GC, and the horns of AT and an unknown troll in the grey room, now revealed to be a computer laboratory. For some reason she chats via Pesterchum with another troll instead of just walking over to talk to them. This new troll is twinArmageddons, an appropriate name for the circumstances, who type2 iin yellow text liike thii2; he is, as it turns out, the hacker guy GC mentioned earlier. TA is busy setting up the network and seems irritable in general, and is not willing to help GA work her viewport.

TA: iif ii 2ee one more 2narl of wiire2. TA: kiind of juttiing out and beiing tangled or whatever. TA: ii am goiing two perform 2ome 2ort of athletiic fuckiing 2omer2ault off the deep end and get a call from the pre2iident or 2ome 2hiit.

Nice callback, but trolls, as we’ll later find out, don’t have presidents.

WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 14

GA wonders why TA doesn’t want to talk to her, and TA complains that he knew in advance the trolls were doomed and no one believed him. He refuses to troll the humans himself but is setting up the system so the others can in order to get them to leave him alone. GA asks again for help, to no avail.

TA: iif you cant fiigure 2hiit out by fuckiing around you dont belong near computer2. TA: kiind of liike wiith regii2tered 2ex offender2 and 2chool2. TA: iif you move two a new town you have two go up two your neiighbor2 door and warn them about how 2tupiid you are. TA: and giive them a chance two hiide all theiir iinnocent technology. TA: and vandaliize your hou2e.

Ooh, a threefer plus one! Tacky simile for the Problematykks. As for WSP, we’ll later find out that 1) trolls kill all their criminals, 2) trolls don’t give a shit about the welfare of their children, and 3) trolls don’t appear to actually go to school. These two counts are neck and neck in the lead now!

CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 17 WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 17

BRIGHT: As with much of Homestuck, the trolls give the impression of being made up as Hussie went along. That’s not entirely a bad thing -- it certainly makes the comic pretty unique -- but it does lead to some out-of-place slip-ups.

Anyway, GA chucks her F1 key at TA’s head and then starts poking him. We also see CG in the lab.

FAILURE ARTIST: I think I recall GA/TA were a popular ship before we learned more about GA. It does seem like they have a Rose & Dave dynamic going on.

BRIGHT: Back on Derse, Rose and Dave have a dance party to Dave’s music while accompanied by some crows and Lil Cal, who keeps teleporting around the room. Rose eventually gets tired of Cal’s shenanigans and hurls him out of the window, to the relief of many.

FAILURE ARTIST: The flash originally included music by Bill Bolin. In fact, it was his unfinished music being included here that caused all the drama in the first place.

BRIGHT: Time for some random interludes! First up is Maplehoof the pony, who is following Rose’s mother through a large cave which, judging by the grist lying around, recently contained very dangerous monsters.

FAILURE ARTIST: Apparently pets can collect grist for their masters...and know what grist is despite being a normal(?) animal.

BRIGHT: First Mom, and then Maplehoof, stand on a transportaliser platform and disappear. Second is Dad, who has just acquired a replacement shoe and hat (which showed up in the walkaround game, way back at the beginning of the Act), when he encounters a familiar-looking stranger with a Colonel Sassacre book, who leads him to another transportalizer platform. Both of these interludes do become relevant later, but at the time they seem a tad unnecessary.

Meanwhile, John uses Rose’s alchemiter and a code Davesprite gave him mid-rant to produce a truly epic hammer called FEAR NO ANVIL. It’s far too big for John to wield, but fortunately he can use the scaling upgrade on the alchemiter to reduce it to a more useable size. ...wait. When did Rose’s alchemiter get a scaling upgrade? Dave and Jade added a lot of modifications to his, but Rose’s should be the original edition. Sigh.

EB: so what is this? EB: the thing the code made... TG: really powerful hammer EB: how do you know? EB: i thought you couldn't use hammers. TG: i cant TG: better be though TG: got it from hephaestus EB: who's that? TG: really tough to kill dude EB: you killed him for it? TG: nope EB: how'd you get it then? TG: shenanigans EB: ok.

...and we’re back to sprite evasiveness. Davesprite is being less than forthcoming here, although it’s less obvious than with Nannasprite because it superficially imitates John and Dave’s bantering.

CHEL: Now, this would be a good way of keeping us interested if we were eventually going to see how he did it, and also they have a time limit, so not going off into a long anecdote would be understandable. However, we’ll see how his evasiveness level proceeds in the future.

BRIGHT: Dream Rose and Dave see John using Rose’s alchemiter on Dream Dave’s computer. Rose wakes up.

FAILURE ARTIST: It is interesting how early Homestuck avoided having characters have face-to-face conversations. Would have been unique if it kept up throughout the entire comic.

BRIGHT: Back in the meteor, GA hassles TA into opening the viewport on her computer. This turns out to be as simple as clicking on the point in Rose’s timeline that she wants to see. No wonder TA was frustrated!

Of course, by this point, the only one left in the room is Rose, now awake, and the young salamander. Rose hurries to catch up with John, but he blasts off to explore before she can reach him, taking her mutated kitten with him.

CHEL: John renames Vodka Mutini to Dr Meowgon Spengler, and Rose renames Casey to Viceroy Bubbles von Salamancer. Interesting link to the themes of identities which are starting to crop up, though it’s not really a direct analogue. The animals are the same animals with different names; the alternate timeline characters have the same names and superficially the same identities, but are they really the same people after their new experiences?

BRIGHT: Back on Derse, Lil Cal inexplicably lands on a stray rocket board, catching the attention of AR.

You're not sure which laws are being broken, but it is probably a lot.

AR follows Cal to yet another transportaliser, and they both dematerialise.

We jump back to John, who spies a boat on one of the islands dotting LOLAR and lands to investigate. He follows hoofprints in the sand into a subterranean hallway filled with monsters. Fortunately his new hammer has time powers, which stun the monsters long enough for John to kill them. Further on, he finds the transportaliser Mom used. John, naturally, stands on it, and is transported to a meteor in the Veil.

Actually, it’s not just a meteor; it’s one of the laboratories where the Skaian troops are produced. John, along with the cat and Maplehoof, finds a bunch of chess guys being grown in glass jars on a giant podium. Most of them are the standard carapaces we’re familiar with, but there are also a few larger pieces, apparently based on knights and rooks. He also finds a JUNIOR ECTOBIOLOGIST’S LAB SUIT, and another of those strange house-shaped sets of monitors.

On Prospit, PM is preparing to board a shuttle to Skaia when a COURTYARD DROLL sneaks up behind her. Unaccountably, she fails to notice him, despite the fact that he’s wearing a hat larger than he is. CD successfully pickpockets the White Queen’s ring, and PM departs for Skaia, none the wiser.

CD radios the DRACONIAN DIGNITARY to report mission success, and is told that he doesn’t need to keep wearing his ridiculous outfit, per orders from Jack Noir, who is now going by the SOVEREIGN SLAYER. CD says he’d rather keep wearing the outfit. Apart from the sword-through-the-chest part, it is a very nice outfit, so I’m with CD on this one.

Catastrophe is averted by Jade delivering a flying kick to CD’s head and following up with a very efficient smackdown. Her robot body replicates this back on Earth, beating the stuffing out of her mummified grandfather. Jade retrieves the ring, and puts it on her fingers to remind herself to give it back to PM later. Unfortunately, this doesn’t cause Jade to sprout wings and tentacles. Seems the rings don’t work on humans like that.

Meanwhile, in a Timeless Expanse, a WARWEARY VILLEIN is getting tired of the battle between Derse and Prospit. The next animation is called “WV?: Rise Up” and it’s one of my favorites! When I first read Homestuck I had to watch it a few times before I understood what was going on, but it is a very neat video.

Watch on YouTube

The Battlefield has been prototyped three times, and is now spherical. The forces of Derse and Prospit meet. The usual carapaces with swords are backed up by larger pieces -- some of them very strange -- and by battleships clashing in the sky. In the chaos, WV, who is farming peacefully on Skaia, has his home and farm burned down. He raises a flag and addresses the troops of both armies. Elsewhere, Jack Noir appears, flying over the Battlefield in search of the Black King.

WV rallies the armies and tells them that their real enemies are the monarchs, who are responsible for the war. Encouraged, the Dersite and Prospitan troops band together and march on the Black King.

Meanwhile, PM has reached the White King and discovers that she no longer has the White Queen’s ring. The White King listens to her and hands over his scepter, which seems to represent Skaia and serves a similar function to the Queens’ rings. Behind a nearby hill, the Hegemonic Brute radios somebody to report the transfer.

As WV and the united armies reach the Black King, Jack arrives and slices the Black King’s scepter in half, nullifying its powers and turning the Black King back into a normal carapace. PM is attacked by HB, who knocks the White King’s scepter out of her hand; it falls down a waterfall. Jack Noir beheads the Black King and turns to WV, and the animation ends.

...okay, much as I love it, I have to admit there’s a glaring question here: Namely, the kids started playing the Game less than a day ago and Dave’s kernelsprite has been prototyped for a few hours max. The second prototyping made the Battlefield more complex and the third took it into its current form. That’s a very short time to instigate a cross-faction revolution, organise the troops, and march on a monarch. For that matter, how long has WV been a farmer? The inhabitants of Derse and Prospit have obviously been doing their thing all the kids’ lives, but the Battlefield was supposedly a static, rudimentary space until John entered the Medium, so what gives?

Then again, the timeline in the Medium is supposed to be distinct from the timeline on Earth, so maybe that explains it?

CHEL: An interesting point is also raised by WV’s revolution. Namely, Derse is presented as a kingdom of darkness and evil by the game, while Prospit is presented as good. However, while PM is good, WV and AR are demonstrably not bad people either. In this animation, we see carapaces of both sides apparently don’t want to be involved in the war and are willing to rise up against the Black King. The rank-and-file carapaces on both sides, it seems, are decent people who are just following orders. (Not to mention very cute.) Jack Noir and his gang are nasty pieces of work, except CD who’s also just kind of going along with it, but there’s nothing saying white carapaces couldn’t also be… And is that a Problematykks point, presenting the black-coloured people as bad and the white-coloured ones as good? I know they’re chess pieces, but still.

This raises the question, however, what’s Derse’s motive? Are its rulers and archagents simply destroying for the evulz? I wonder. I also wonder how much Skaia itself is involved in this and how aware it is. Skaia is called the crucible of creation, and it’s responsible for the creation of the carapaces too. References are made to it “seeing” and “knowing”; it’s quite possibly sentient, though maybe not sapient. On top of that, SBurb is specifically a game, and a game needs an objective, and an adventure-type game needs enemies. Derse, it seems likely, was created and presented the way it is in order to give the players something to battle against even if its people don’t want to be their enemies. No wonder WV’s pissed!

BRIGHT: Yup. Hmm, thinking about it...the imps and other enemies we saw attacking John’s house early on were obviously Dersite, but the ones we’ve seen in Rose’s seem to be Prospitian, if anything? The colour scheme looks that way, at least. But Nanna said earlier that Derse was the enemy, nothing about Prospit.

Perhaps it has something to do with Rose being a Derse dreamer, while John is a Prospit dreamer? But in that case I’d have expected it to come up in the text. Instead it just goes unremarked.

Rose goes on a massive alchemising spree and ends up creating the Thorns of Oglogoth, a pair of wands.

The needles seem to shiver with the dark desires of THE DEEP ONE. Any sane adventurer would cast these instruments of the occult into the FURTHEST RING and forget they ever existed.

Instead of throwing the wands away, Rose takes on the enemies camping all over her house, with style.

Meanwhile, Dave goes on another, less visibly productive alchemising spree.

GET ON WITH IT!: 18

FAILURE ARTIST: The SBaHJifier could be considered productive in that it provides foreshadowing cartoons. Wish Dave’s Brain in a Jar came up again.

BRIGHT: Once he’s done creating smuppet variations to disturb the monsters encroaching on his house, he sits down to take a look at those two journals he copied from Rose earlier. One of them is called ‘MEOW’, and is literally just those same four letters, repeated over and over in different orders. The second is ‘Complacency of the Learned’.

There is no way to adequately recap the beauty of ‘Complacency of the Learned’, so we’re just going to show the whole thing:

Frigglish bothered his beard, as if unkinking a hitch in a long silk windsock. A more pedestrian audience would parse the exhibit as nervous compulsion. Behavior to petition contempt among the reasonable. He was however not surrounded by the reasonable, but the wise, a distinction in men that would forever be the difference in history's garland of treasured follies. As a matter of fact, his cadre of fellow wizards were all putting similar moves on their beards as well. The practice would evince thoughtfulness - sagacity, even - if they didn't do it all the time. Standing in line at the bank. Shooing squirrels from bird feeders. Few occasions were safe. Zazzerpan inspected the clue. A single piece of evidence cradled in his coriaceous old man palms. It was a human bone, not striking in the tale it told alone so much as that told by the thousands like it festooning the marshy soil of the mass grave. The grisly expanse bore the texture of a decadent dessert, like one of Smarny's formidable custard trifles wobbled out on wheels for the holidays, to the dismay of a small nation. "You're certain of this?" asked Frigglish. Despite what he was doing with his beard, he was, in fact, immersed in meaningful contemplation. "I am afraid I am becoming more so with each terrible tick groused by that gaudy timepiece slung around your neck." In case it wasn't clear, Frigglish wore a clock Zazzerpan didn't care for. It was magic. "The massacre of Syrs Gnelph was not as written." "What has you convinced it was the hand of our disciples in this blackness?" Executus chimed in. "I believe... I..." a fat face stammered, eyes darting with the guilt of a thief in the throes of an unraveling alibi. "I can summon a... more pressing line of inquiry..." No, Smarny. Nobody was in the mood for a sticky bundt loaf just now. Zazzerpan's ears fell insubstantial to any line of inquiry, pastry-oriented or otherwise. His abstruse contour carved a pondering shape in the fog carpeting centuries-dead. His eleven contemporaries too embraced the muted consternation of their great Predicant Scholar. Few wizards kept sharper adumbratives or read them with such lucidity. When Zazzerpan treated men with silence it was seldom unrepaid by the wise and reasonable alike. It was harrowing to entertain. Zazzerpan the Learned's storied Complacency of Wizards was marked for grander descendence. Disciples hand-picked, vetted by Ockite the Bonafide and tested by Gastrell the Munificent. The twelve sweetest, most studious children a pair of elderly eyes could give their sparkle. Not the ragged guttersnipe so oft-harvested by the common Obscenity, those vituperative little beggars with hearts to corrupt as dropped bananas brown. That these chosen youngsters would turn was not merely unthinkable, but something of a roundhouse to the temporal bones of the Upper Indifference's high chamber of Softskulled Prophets. His wisdom-savaged brow pruned further with recount of his many lessons to wouldbe successors. Lessons to advance humanity's elucidation and prosperity, an outcome this bleak trail now painfully obviated. There were few puzzles The Learned could not suspend and dissect in the recondite manifold beneath his extremely expensive pointy hat. Daring to pitch his cherished pupils in with the foul melange of history's rogues, the heretofore abstract scourge that built up civilizations with ungodly magic and tore them down with joyful malice, would prove an intellectual trespass to make his calcium-deficient bones quake. And more daring yet was the only question that now mattered. Could a bunch of bearded, scraggly old men in preposterous outfits hunt them down? He didn't have an answer. Only a simple observation so blunt and uncharacteristically jejune for the lauded sage it was breathtaking in its selfevidency. "We're going to need more wands." (Wow. Think of something better.)

Wow.

Dave is understandably intimidated by this, and decides to stop reading for now. He puts his copy of the SBURB Beta in the notebook to act as a bookmark, and leaves both books in his room for later.

Then he checks in on Rose, who is burning her version of the MEOW book.

CHEL: Dave inquires about the wizard story.

TG: i thought you hated wizards TG: whats the deal with that TT: I like wizards. TT: What I don't like is my mother's obsession with feigning interest in them to antagonize me. TG: oh man thats so messed up TG: that you think that TG: she probably digs wizards for real just like you and youre blowing shit out of proportion like pretty much always

Once again, we see exactly how fucked-up Rose’s relationship with her mother is. Mom Lalonde has somehow managed to raise a child in such a way that Rose interprets everything her mother does as an attempt to mock and provoke her.

ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 16

TIER: The Lalondes are pretty damn dysfunctional as a family unit, and considering the zany nature of early Homestuck and its world's weird logic that is saying something indeed.

CHEL: As for the MEOW book, it turns out the gods from the Furthest Ring informed Rose while she was sleeping that the book’s contents are highly dangerous and must be destroyed. Said gods dwell in the sky above Derse; Dave’s never heard or seen them, but Rose points out his dreamself is always wearing shades, listening to music, and distracted by Cal.

TT: You're the prince of the moon. TG: ........ TT: I'm sure they've been meaning to seek a royal audience. TG: ..........................

Davesprite chats to Rose next. She protests at being spied on by two people, but Davesprite asks her why she burned the codebook. She didn’t need to in the future, but according to her future memories of the gods absorbed from her future dreamself, Davesprite appeared to make it relevant by traveling to the past. A sinister and familiar face watches through Dave’s window, soon proving to be the Draconian Dignitary, while Dave and Davesprite awkwardly spout elaborate mixed metaphors about how safe they are, until Dave, embarrassed, says "so i guess ill go back down and burn that book".

As any savvy reader could guess, he’s too late. The prompt suggests that he should go back in time to stop the books from being stolen, but, well...

It looks like you already tried that. GORE GALORE: 10

Dave looks completely undisturbed, but whether he is undisturbed is a different matter. He flings the corpse out the window into the lava, claiming it would freak Jade out.

John, in the lab, presses a button, causing the first monitor to depict his town, shortly before his birth. There is a Betty Crocker factory and a shopping mall, neither of which are in the town now. Zooming in locks a target over Nanna Egbert, who is taking a stroll with Dad. A meteor looms; this looks like it’s going to go very badly, considering the target lock, but it hits the factory instead. When John presses the glowing blue button, a PARADOX GHOST IMPRINT of Nanna is created; refer back to Rose’s experimentation in the lab and the green slime blobs. This time, the slime is sucked into a tube.

The next monitor does something similar with Grandpa Harley on his ship, and the next the same with Bro Strider, who stands over a meteor crater on an unseasonably warm day; something of an understatement, as the sky is the same lurid red and the sun the same glowing spiral that they were during the Strider bros’ battle even though it’s December. Bro is, regardless, prepared for the occasion with a small pair of outrageously awesome shades. What he needs these for will soon be revealed.

The fourth monitor goes back to John’s home town, a gigantic crater where the factory once was. In the shopping mall, Dad Egbert stands outside a joke shop, while Nanna apparently remains inside, busying herself with a tall bookshelf, a ladder, and a rather hefty unabridged joke book.

Mom Lalonde, clutching the infant Rose and wearing a rather snazzy long Jaspersprite-pink scarf, has come to town to study the meteor impact at the request of Grandpa Harley while he explores elsewhere. Unfortunately, now is the time a meteor chooses to strike Nanna’s location, destroying the shop.

An old mother lost today, but a new son gained.

Wait for it.

Mom Lalonde flees, dropping her scarf, which Dad Egbert picks up and slightly creepily sniffs. The monitor continues tracking her, and John captures her paradox imprint too, starting the machines whirring away...

Four babies abruptly appear on the pad, already diapered and bespectacled and old enough to sit up unaided. Convenient, no?

When the kitten jumps on a green button, the slime is blended in pairs; Nanna’s and Grandpa’s, and Mom’s and Bro’s. More blinking lights ensue, and another four extremely familiar-looking babies appear.

BRIGHT: I will say this: These kids are adorable.

While babies clamber over him, John vaults up his echeladder to the rank of Ectobiolobabysitter, acquiring one million Boondollars in the process. This automatically converts itself to a Boonbuck, the weight of which smashes his Porkhollow.

Finding out just what is going on here will have to wait, as the comic takes a brief detour to a battleship navigating the Medium nearby. There’s someone very familiar at the wheel…

An old man has much to do before he returns to Earth, dies, gets stuffed by his adopted-yet-biological daughter-slash-grand-daughter, and stuck in front of a fireplace.

Also aboard the ship are Dad Egbert and Mom Lalonde. Dad returns Mom’s scarf, and the two of them hold hands as Grandpa Harley pilots the ship towards Skaia.

We return to the lab, where John has his hands full with the babies. One of them has managed to break one of the paradox slime jars from earlier, but appears uninjured. Also, CG’s trolling him again.

CHEL: CG makes mention of the ULTIMATE RIDDLE, but John is confused because CG hasn’t told him about that yet. He uses an ableist description in explaining.

CG: SEE I KIND OF PAINTED MYSELF INTO A CORNER. CG: I STARTED TROLLING YOU AT THE END, JUST BEFORE THE RIFT. CG: AND THEN JUMPED BACK A LITTLE. CG: AND NOW I GUESS I'VE BECOME RAILROADED INTO WORKING BACKWARDS HERE. CG: UNLESS I WANT TO DO THE SORT OF DUMB SCHIZOPHRENIC HOPPING AROUND LIKE THE OTHERS. CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 18

… why wouldn’t you just hop right back to the start and work in a linear fashion from there?

TIER: Because CG excels at making things complicated for himself and is fundamentally rather stubborn and set in his ways/actions. Like he's made his bed, he's gonna lie in it.

CHEL: Anyway, CG banters with John for a bit, and then informs him that he (John) has arrived in the Veil and created infant versions of the players and their guardians.

EB: so they are like cloned copies of us? CG: NO. CG: THEY ARE LITERALLY YOU AND YOUR GUARDIANS. CG: PARADOX CLONES.

A paradox clone, we are informed, is A CORRECTLY CLONED DUPLICATE THAT WILL INEVITABLY GO BACK IN TIME AND BECOME THE ORIGINAL TARGET THAT WAS CLONED. The game worlds contain many clues hinting at the ultimate destiny of the players to create their own selves through the game, and the only way things could possibly go involved the players creating themselves, or else the game session would never happen.

CG: WHICH IS ESPECIALLY PATHETIC SINCE PARADOX SPACE APPARENTLY WENT TO ALL THIS TROUBLE TO MAKE YOU JUST TO HAVE YOU FAIL AND DIE. CG: REALLY THERE'S NOTHING MORE TRAGIC THAN THESE NULL SESSIONS FULL OF KIDS ENTERING THE GAME AND FULFILLING SOME COSMIC DESTINY SHIT JUST TO GET WIPED OUT AND LEAVE BEHIND AN EMPTY POINTLESS INCIPISPHERE FOR ALL ETERNITY.

Tragic and completely unnecessary, when there are millions of perfectly good humans already in existence who could just as easily create winning game sessions without this aspect of it. Here we see another aspect of Homestuck which hasn’t come up quite so clearly before; an extremely weird take on determinism. I’m not sure if this is meant as a parody of Chosen One plotlines or if Hussie just thought it sounded cool, but it’s uncomfortable. As it turns out, only clones created by SBurb have a hope in hell of winning the game, and even they fail most of the time. Regular people who enter the game to save themselves from the destruction of the planet will fail and die there, which honestly is not really selling this game as a good thing, since it’s what causes the destruction of the planet in the first place. I’ve had actual, legitimate, honest-to-God nightmares about this aspect of SBurb, and I’m not ashamed to admit it.

FAILURE ARTIST: I think many fans wish to play SBurb. There’s lots of fan sessions and fake GameFAQs and custom Lands. Yet in reality SBurb is not a fun time. This is cosmic horror. I think Hussie is sometimes playing it for horror and sometimes he ignores the implications.

Then again, some people want to live on the troll planet, which is straight-up dystopia.

CHEL: Again, it isn’t really clear what he’s going for. Is it supposed to be terrifying or did he just think it would be clever? Does even Hussie know what he was going for? While it’s not exactly a joke, I think it’s worth another point here:

ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 17

It might be a joke. As I said, I could see it as a parody of or playing with the Chosen One narrative. In this case, literally only the chosen ones have any hope, for reasons that are not down to any merit of their own. But if it is, there isn’t really much made of it.

Of course, the reasons people want to live on the troll planet are reasonable when taken alone, but a) contradicted every alternate scene and b) not a fair trade for everything else that’s going on there. But we’ll get to that when we actually see it. And I admit, SBurb powers would be fun, but not worth the loss of my entire species.

TIER: To me at least it's fun in the same way wondering how I'd fare as a wizard during Harry Potter's years at Hogwarts, or a ninja in Naruto is. Fundamentally you'd rather want to never encounter this sorta stuff even if you get some swanky I guess powers, but the mental exercise of it is quite honestly, really fun. The game has quite a lot of interesting things to poke around with, from lands to quests to what your co-players are up to. And I'm def guilty of playing trollsona games, because the world presented is just really fascinating in its gruesome glory.

Never want to have to actually go through it, Lord knows I'd be dead within the first ten minutes if I'm super lucky, but stories about it are pretty neat.

CHEL: That’s true, but the paradox clones thing seems almost to be taunting us for having that mentality. We can pretend we’d be the super-smart strong competent ones who make it, but in this universe if we demonstrably have parents we’re doomed to die for nothing and there’s nothing we can do about it.

BRIGHT: Another fun thing about this is that it fundamentally isolates the players from the rest of humanity. If you think about it, unless they have children with a non-player, they are completely unrelated to anyone else on Earth.

CHEL: And they can’t have kids with a non-player unless something thoroughly horrible happened, because as is stated later SBurb specifically takes its players away and destroys their planet around the point of their puberty.

BRIGHT: Although I think John is actually related to Dad — as far as we’re told, Dad is in fact Nanna’s biological son, which makes him genetically John’s half-brother.

They also miss out on (going by how active the babies are) the first couple of years of life. Those two years are crucial in terms of brain development. SBURB probably controls for that, but it wouldn’t be surprising if there were negative consequences.

Oh, and if you’re a player, your existence means your civilisation is doomed. Lovely!

CHEL: And do the players ever feel any guilt or conflict over this? Do they hell. It doesn’t even occur to them, and I’m pretty sure it didn’t occur to Hussie either.

TIER: Welcome to the hell game that is SBURB; it's fundamentally pretty fucked up! It runs on a hellish scale of "things have already been predetermined" and I am Big Fear™.

CHEL: That’ll come up later, too, but there it’s obviously intentional nightmare fuel, and not at all a bad use of time travel as a story device.

CG, meanwhile, explains that he was the one to create his session’s players. With twelve of them it was a bit more complicated, but troll lineages are complicated anyway, and we’ll find out how later.

The babies are still getting all over the lab. Note that they're repeatedly referred to as "little pink monkeys". Then again, calling a non-white child a monkey really wouldn't be good.

WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 18

John’s infant self has latched onto the Sassacre book, while his infant Nanna is sitting in Dad Egbert’s old hat. Baby Bro is napping in the lap of Lil Cal; that baby’s braver than I am, I can tell you that. Baby Dave is sitting on Maplehoof, and baby Grandpa has found a pair of pistols. John does not take them away from him, or even seem to notice he has them.

HURRY UP AND DO NOTHING: 7

BRIGHT: Earlier baby Bro broke one of the paradox slime cylinders and was sitting in it. John is pretty astoundingly bad at keeping babies away from obvious hazards.

TIER: That or the equipment is probably not sturdy enough to make it past an inspection into faulty management.

CHEL: But then he’s distracted by CG trolling him again, at least this time moving forward in time from the last conversation.

CG, like GA, apparently fails to grasp sarcasm...

EB: we had this great dare going. EB: to see who could be the least helpful and informative. EB: and you totally lost, dude! EB: you were hella helpful. CG: I WAS OBVIOUSLY JUST SPITING YOUR STUPID POINTLESS HUMAN DARE. [...] CG: ANYWAY, HOW COULD WE HAVE MADE A DARE IF I'M MOVING BACKWARDS ON YOUR TIMELINE.

… which is weird because moments later he uses it himself.

EB: do you even have elves? CG: YES, LET'S COMPARE WHICH FANTASY CREATURES THAT DON'T EXIST WE BOTH DO OR DON'T NOT HAVE. CG: WHAT A GREAT FUCKING IDEA, JOHN!

Hussie seems to waver back and forth a lot on whether trolls get sarcasm or not, in general. Since he’s contradicting himself with troll worldbuilding, that’s a point.

WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 19

Banter aside, he informs John that the babies are sent to Earth via meteors during the Reckoning.

BRIGHT: How do they survive the impact? Some of those meteor strikes destroy buildings. Those are some ridiculously resilient kids.

CHEL: Cut to AR, who is still having fun on the rocketboard, until he runs into a frog temple atop a meteor. This is apparently horrifying and illegal by his standards.

You are going to throw whoever is responsible into the slammer. You always call jail the slammer when you are extra angry at crimes.

Inside, he finds an empty time capsule, like Jade’s, some complicated machinery, and a monitor screen showing a greyscale house with a very familiar bespectacled female infant and dirty old hat in it. The year depicted, says the monitor, is 1910. Enter none other than Colonel Sassacre himself.

Eight days prior, the orphan girl was taken in by an aristocratic southern colonel and legendary humorist. He recovered the young lady from a crater where a bakery once stood, operated by the man's wife, a notable baked goods baroness.

An explosion outside leads them both to a crater, where once stood the doghouse of the colonel’s pet, Halley, but before the Colonel can investigate further he’s shot through the heart.

This is exactly why babies should not be allowed to dual-wield flintlock pistols.

BRIGHT: I remain baffled as to how Baby Grandpa can even lift those things, let alone pull the triggers.

CHEL: Baby Grandpa crawls from the crater, and Halley the dog turns out to be alive.

The young boy has difficulty pronouncing the name though. Sounds more like "Harley" when he says it.

How does he know it? The colonel died before he even noticed the baby was there. Is baby Nanna speaking well enough to tell him yet? I guess he could be told later, as Sassacre wasn’t in fact their only sapient guardian...

Thirteen years later, the boy develops a taste for adventure. He and his guardian bid farewell. His sister is sad. She will be left all alone with the wicked pastry baroness. She can handle it, he tells her. He believes in her.

It isn’t clear why she didn’t go with him, or leave under her own power. They don’t seem to be imprisoned, as the panel depicts them outside on grass with no restraints or guards over them, so it’s not a matter of only one of them being able to get out. That’s a point for Nanna not trying and a point for Grandpa not bringing her:

HURRY UP AND DO NOTHING: 9

That dog is also remarkably lively, considering it, unlike Bec, is an entirely normal dog, it was an adult thirteen years previously, and it’s somehow supporting the weight of an entire teenager on its back (again, please don’t try this at home, you can break the dog’s spine that way).

FAILURE ARTIST: As we’ve said, Colonel Sassacre is a thinly-veiled Mark Twain expy. The real Mark Twain died in 1910 at the same time Halley’s Comet was in the sky. It’s a cute historical gag having him be literally killed by a comet but it does muck up the timeline. Nanna must have been a senior citizen when Dad was born. Perhaps he’s adopted?

CHEL: The other option is that Dad is a senior citizen now, but surely John would have wondered why his dad is so ridiculously old. I think it’s just that thing in mainstream comics and cartoons where adults are split into Old and Not Old, and the parents are normal ages for parents but the grandparents would have to be in their hundreds going by the gags. See how Scrooge McDuck in the DuckTales reboot is over a hundred and forty years old yet his sister’s son is still a youngish adult.

AR notes that the appearifier is centred over Halley the dog, but hears someone coming. It proves to be the Draconian Dignitary. AR hides and watches, noting that DD is carrying Rose’s notebooks and Dave’s beta envelopes. DD keeps the MEOW book, but throws away the other items. Complacency of the Learned lands on the floor, and the envelopes land in the time capsule, which sets to bloom in four hundred and thirteen million years.

Meanwhile, John talks to CG while infant Mom Lalonde pets the mutant kitten. John asks if there’s any way to delay the Reckoning, but nope; CG warns him that the smallest meteors will start going in only a few minutes.

EB: ok, well you keep saying how doomed we are and how all this bad stuff happens sooner, but you never say why! EB: what happens in our game that's different from yours that makes things go so badly? CG: JACK NOIR.

The Jack Noir from the trolls’ game session allied with them and helped them dethrone and exile the Black Queen, while the one from the humans’ session, as you may recall, killed the Black Monarchs and gained their powers, and is currently rampaging through the Incipisphere. John asks if it’s the same Jack Noir, but CG explains.

CG: SO LET'S SAY YOU PLAY YOUR BANDICOOT AND I PLAY MY BANDICOOT. CG: THEY ARE ESSENTIALLY THE SAME BANDICOOT, SAME APPEARANCE AND DESIGN AND BEHAVIORS. CG: BUT THEY ARE STILL COMPLETELY SEPARATE BANDICOOTS ON SEPARATE SCREENS. CG: SO WE BOTH HAVE OUR OWN ASS BANDICOOTS TO OURSELVES, THE SAME BUT DIFFERENT. CG: OUR JACKS ARE THE SAME BUT DIFFERENT TOO. CG: SAME GUY, DIFFERENT CIRCUMSTANCES AND OUTCOMES. CG: OUR JACK TRUMPED THE QUEEN, BUT GOT NO FURTHER. CG: YOUR JACK GOT THE BEST OF BOTH OF THEM, AND IS NOW SOMETHING HIGHER THAN A QUEEN OR A KING… EB: like an ace? CG: SURE OK.

The trolls don’t know what went so differently to cause the two Jacks to behave so differently, but CG doesn’t think it matters by now. John interrupts him, deciding to do yet another Con Air ending re-enactment.

Watch on YouTube

Recap: montage of Con Air posters and images to the tune of “How Do I Live Without You”. John hands the thoroughly disgusting Con Air bunny to the protesting baby Rose, while CG watches huffily on his monitor. Jade demands a toy too, so John hands her the bunny he received from Rose in an excessively dramatic fashion. CG frustratedly hits himself in the head. In scribbly crayon-like drawings, Casey the salamander performs a drum solo with glowing blue mushrooms for drums and the Con Air plane crashes. More Con Air imagery, John embraces baby Jade and the baby Lalondes while sobbing; GC points and laughs at him over CG’s shoulder and they have a slapfight. John imagines himself in Nic Cage’s iconic wifebeater and mullet and performs an air guitar solo.

TIER: Lemme tell ya, as someone who's only experience with this darn movie is whatever pops up courtesy of John this sequence is just a trip and a half. Possibly a higher number.

CHEL: Cut to end-of-act curtains; they open on the next page, declaring a PSYCHE; there are more pages to go.

Cut to Dave’s hands, covered in the dead Dave’s blood. I… guess he’s supposed to be staring at them in shock? It’s impossible to tell through his shades. For all I know he could be worried about the cleanup. GC trolls him and they banter creepily, with her demanding to know what his blood smells like and him taunting her about her blindness.

TG: just him and me TG: havin a see party TG: like a couple of eagle eyed bros peepin shit up into the wee hours GC: D4V3 GC: C4N 1 COM3 TO YOUR S33 P4RTY? TG: i guess but youll have to be careful not to stumble around bumping into all the gorgeous masterpieces hanging around everywhere TG: god so beautiful to look at with my perfect eyesight GC: C4N 1 L1CK TH3 P41NT1NGS? TG: yeah thats fine

Neither of them seems to take it particularly hard. If there was narrative around the dialogue, I think we’d get a better grasp of how Dave feels. Lacking much body language or punctuation, tone is a bit tricky to get.

FAILURE ARTIST: There’s a character later who gets a lot of grief for insulting her blindness but reading what John, Dave, and CG say I don’t know how that character could be worse.

CHEL: AT, meanwhile, is trolling Jade, rather politely. He even takes time to ask if she’s having a good nap. She’s worried about John’s dreamself not waking, and AT scrolls into his view of the future timeline, but can’t find John awake, nor see into his dreams. Jade, however, will wake up soon, and she thanks him for this report. Unfortunately, when Jade wakes up she will be in danger, and AT can’t see any further. He tells her CG wants to talk to her about her exploding robot. He can’t see whether it exploded or not because there are a lot of explosions, but asking future Jade shows it did, and that she declared CG to be a pretty nice guy, which surprises AT since he doesn’t think CG is particularly nice. Jade says she thinks AT is nice too, and asks why he’s the only one who talks to her while she’s asleep.

AT: bECAUSE YOU HAVE A ROBOT, tO LET YOU SAY THINGS THAT HAPPEN, oN PROSPIT, AT: aND i'M CURIOUS, AT: bECAUSE THE ONLY TIME i EVER HAD FUN PLAYING THIS GAME WAS WHEN i WAS ASLEEP, AT: bUT NOW ALL OUR DREAM SELVES ARE DEAD, AT: }:'(

AT happily remembers his own time on Prospit, and we cut back to Rose, being trolled by GA despite the fact that Rose is obviously in the middle of an epic magic battle. The conversation is understandably chilly, and GA still hasn’t figured out that “Dumb Rose” as opposed to “Smart Rose” was John rather than a bizarre roleplaying scenario.

GC continues trolling Dave. He asks her how she operates a computer without sight.

GC: 1M SORRY D4V3 TH4T YOU W1LL N3V3R 3XP3R13NC3 TH3 S3NSORY BOUQU3T TH4T 1 3NJOY 3V3RY D4Y GC: TH4T 1 3NSCONC3 MYS3LF 1N L1K3 4 W4RM 4ND COMFY B4THROB3 M4D3 OF FL4VOR 4ND M3LODY TG: oh ok TG: so the dumbest and most far fetched explanation imaginable ok got it

Yes, pretty much. This brings me to a Problematykks point; GC is supposed to be blind, but it really doesn’t seem to affect her in any way at all. Its workaround is ridiculously convenient and effective, and while I’m not blind myself, I know many people with physical disabilities hate it when fiction does this. I know I would be pissed off if a piece of fiction showed an easy and convenient way to not have autism anymore. (Horrible, horrible memories of someone back in the days of Livejournal’s Fanficrants of a fic in which autism was somehow cured by having a foursome. I don’t remember how that was supposed to work.) “She’s a space alien” only goes so far in explaining it. Why even bother making her blind if it’s not going to affect her in any way?

CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 19

FAILURE ARTIST: She’s the least blind blind person in media. Characters like Daredevil from Marvel Comics and Toph from Avatar the Last Airbender have a Disability Superpower but at the end of the day they still can’t do things like read printed text. GC has no disadvantages.

BRIGHT: She can apparently smell and taste photons.

Which raises the question why none of the other trolls ever show a heightened sense of smell or taste. If GC can learn to interpret smells as colours, her sense of smell must have been that strong all along, and there’s no indication in the text that she’s biologically more sensitive than her companions. Trolls must be better at following a trail than bloodhounds.

CHEL: Synaesthesia which makes one strongly associate colours with smells is a thing, and synaesthesia is generally the word the fandom uses to explain Terezi’s ability, but you still have to actually see the colours for that to work. If she was only mostly blind and was picking up blurry colour patches, I could buy it (and that is how the fandom tends to do it with human AUs), but not if she’s supposed to be completely blind, and she still wouldn’t be able to read text that way.

BRIGHT: Time for another animation, and for a hop back into the recent past.

Watch on YouTube

As the meteor locked onto Dave’s house approaches, Dave climbs up the tower to retrieve his cruxite egg from the nest his sprite made. Unfortunately the sprite attacks him, knocking him and the egg off the tower. Bro Strider appears on top of the approaching meteor and slices it in half with his katana; the two halves are diverted by the blow and strike different areas of the city. Dave’s fall is broken by a rocket board, which is presumably how Bro got up to the meteor in the first place. (How did he manage to aim it to intercept Dave’s fall? Wouldn’t it take longer to get from the meteor to Dave than it takes for Dave to fall from the top of the tower to the roof of the building? We shall never know.) The egg hatches, and Dave is transported into the Medium. There’s no sign of what happens to Bro.

CHEL: Yet more cartoon physics around the Strider bros.

BRIGHT: I don’t know if we mentioned this earlier, but although Dave and Bro live in an apartment block that presumably housed multiple people, only Dave’s apartment gets transported into the Medium. Everyone else in the complex is left to die on Earth. SBURB is sociopathic.

Elsewhere in the Medium, back in the present, Grandpa’s ship is approaching Skaia, with Mom Lalonde and Dad Egbert on board.

Down on Skaia, Jack Noir draws his sword and slaughters the army WV raised to march on the Black King. WV cowers, but Jack leaves him alive. He then uses the Black Queen’s ring to send some sort of giant red tentacle attack through Skaia, slaughtering Dersite and Prospitian forces indiscriminately.

CHEL: Are they tentacles? I always thought of them as some sort of lightning lasers.

BRIGHT: That makes a lot more sense!

In the ectobiology lab, as the clock ticks down to the Reckoning, the babies are teleported to asteroids around the lab. There must be an air supply in this asteroid belt — characters are consistently shown as being able to survive outside.

CHEL: Maybe it’s just the players’ natural badassery. Batman Can Breathe In Space.

BRIGHT: On Skaia, CD makes his way through Jack’s slaughter fest, which has now ravaged a sizeable chunk of planet, and hands him the White King’s sceptre. Jack raises the sceptre and initiates the Reckoning. The meteorites start to vanish into Skaia’s defence portals. In the frog temple, DD somehow combines the MEOW genetic code with a paradox clone of Halley, creating Jade���s guardian Bec. Bec’s creation damages the laboratory equipment in the temple.

Cut to Jade, who is snoozing peacefully while her dream self explores Prospit. She looks up at Skaia, to see Jack’s shadow passing in front of it. Jack launches his tentacle attack on Prospit, slaughtering the inhabitants, then severs the chain attaching Prospit’s moon to the planet. The moon begins falling towards Skaia.

Jack then flies to LOHAC, where he encounters Bro Strider on one of the turntable mesas. Unexpectedly, Bro is able to give Jack an even fight. After a few exchanges, he drives his katana into the mesa; some sort of golden light emanates from the crack, and Bro absconds.

Wait, how did Bro get onto LOHAC? How did he survive the meteor impacts?

TIER: The ol' "rule of cool". As long as something is sufficiently "absolutely kickass!!" the rules of reality and physics can go sit on the bleachers twiddling their thumbs for all they fucking matter. There's a reason early fandom pinned down Bro as an unorthodox but immensely cool older brother type guy for so long. Because with what little information was available before we got bludgeoned with "No actually he was the absolute fucking worst thing to happen to Dave and fucked him up for life" that was the general impression he gave off.

CHEL: This and the meteor splitting are yet more reason not to take Bro’s treatment of Dave seriously; this is a world in which ludicrous animesque badassery rules the day, and physically impossible feats of battle occur every five minutes. Forcing a child to go through extensive and excessive sword training in brutal heat in a precarious place, possibly every day, ought by rights to be normal there, and I can’t believe he was physically hurt by swordfighting when he survived a meteor collision as an infant. Besides, training that extensive quite possibly could be the only thing that would keep Dave alive in these circumstances.

ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 18

BRIGHT: There’s a random Squiddles interlude, and then we return to Skaia.

John’s unconscious dream self has fallen out of Prospit’s moon as it plummets towards Skaia. Jade tries shaking him awake, and then slaps him, but to no avail. At the last moment, she throws him out of the path of the moon, and her dream self is then killed when it lands on her. Back on Earth, her dreambot overloads and explodes.

CHEL: Taking her tower room with it; Jade’s sleeping body plummets towards the earth.

BRIGHT: The moon leaves a gigantic crater in Skaia. John’s now-conscious dreamself hovers above it.

The babies vanish through the defence portals to Earth.

CHEL: Each takes an item with them. John takes the Sassacre book, Rose the first Con Air bunny, Dave rides Maplehoof, Jade takes the bunny Rose gave to John (which is in fact the Con Air bunny plus several years and repairs), Nanna sits inside Dad’s old hat, Mom takes the mutant kitten, Bro sleeps in the lap of Li’l Cal, and Grandpa dual wields the flintlock pistols he should not be allowed.

BRIGHT: Dave and Rose reach the Gates above their houses and set out to explore their Lands. We close on an eerie shot of Bec outside the frog temple on Jade’s island at night.

CHEL: Jade’s tower room is blown to bits, and a truly enormous meteor hovers over the scene.

Curtains close. End of Act 4. Before Act 5, we receive a message from Rose, via her GameFAQ.

[ZZZZ] Rose: Egress. This is my final entry. My co-players and I have made every earnest attempt, with occasional relapse, to play this game the right way.

Really? You haven’t been in the game for more than a couple of hours and Jade still isn’t in at all! Maybe consider that the fact that not all your players are in the game yet when you wonder why it isn’t working?

I have been meticulous in documenting the process to help our peers and successors through the trials should we fail. In my hubris I believed these classes were relegated to the Earth-bound, but in even this quaint supposition I was in error. Our otherworldly antagonists have assured us of our inevitable failure repeatedly, while the gods whisper corroboration in my sleep. I believe them now. I just blew up my first gate. I’m not sure why I did it, really. I am not playing by the rules anymore. I will fly around this candy-coated rock and comb the white sand until I find answers. No one can tell me our fate can’t be repaired. We’ve come too far. I jumped out of the way of a burning fucking tree, for God’s sake.

I can see her point. The game is horrible and should be stopped. On the other hand, I’d at least attempt to spend more than one day investigating it before trying to break it. Randomly destroying shit is more likely to make things much worse than anything else.

I have used a spell to rip this walkthrough from Earth’s decaying network, and sealed it in one of the servers floating in the Furthest Ring. The gods may disperse the signal throughout the cosmos as they wish. Perhaps it will be of use to past or future species who like us have been ensnared by Skaia’s malevolent tendrils. In case it wasn’t clear, magic is real. Pardon my egress. You’re on your own now.

This note is signed with a glowing multicoloured “RL” and revealed to be emitted from a purple box with an aerial, floating in space. It seems that’s how their internet’s still working.

FAILURE ARTIST: The internet seems to be a magical dimension in Homestuck and not something that’s part of physical infrastructure.

CHEL: Hours in the future, WV lands in the desert remains of Earth, wrapped up in John’s old ghost-patterned bedsheet, which is still white. A villein becomes a vagabond. In his memory, he tears up an effigy of Jack Noir… where’d he get it? Did the game create it for some reason? Anyway, John’s blanket falls on him from the sky as Prospit plummets; WV calls it a RAG OF SOULS. Adorably melodramatic.

John’s awoken dreamself gazes sadly at Jade’s deceased one, which for some reason isn’t actually under the rubble of Prospit and appears to still be three-dimensional. There’s no excessive blood splatter like with the dead Dave, which is good, not too over the top. He retrieves the Queen’s ring from her hand. Was he told at any point that it’s important? Because if he doesn’t know, I’m not sure robbing the dead is very heroic. He sees an image of himself flying over the battlefield in a large cloud above him; in the vision he’s near a castle, so he goes to seek it out.

On Earth, PM wraps herself up in an old Prospit banner. A mistress becomes a mendicant. In her memories, she has beheaded the Hegemonic Brute and is arranging a meeting with Jack Noir. He arrives and she presents the crowns; smirking evilly, he honours their bargain, and the Courtyard Droll brings her the green parcel. She brings it to the castle from John’s vision as he arrives there, hands over the box, and angrily walks away.

FAILURE ARTIST: She’s Honor Before Reason (maybe she’s programmed that way) but she has the right reaction. This is a lot to go through to deliver a package.

CHEL: Inside the box is a letter from Jade’s unknown pen pal, who writes in dark green and a distinctive jolly-hockey-sticks dialect, with a tendency to ramble off on tangents about movies and wrestling.

Anyway you should listen to jade from here on out john because she sure seems to know whats best for you. Whatever your adventure throws at you im sure shell tell you you can handle it. She believes in you.

And another letter from Jade.

even though its super late and you probably went through a lot of trouble to get it, i really hope this present cheers you up! you looked so sad while you were reading my letter. um... which is to say, the one you are reading now.

She explains that in her dreams she goes to Prospit and John’s sleeping dream self is there, and that’s where she gets her visions. She hopes he likes his present, and says her penpal is fun…

john i am REALLY looking forward to seeing you when you wake up!!!!! its been nice playing with my prospitian friends and all, but also kind of lonely knowing you were in the other tower sleeping and having lousy dreams. :( im not sure where i am when you are reading this but im sure ill make it down to where you are soon! (jeez how did you get down there??? oh well ill find out) i cant wait to fly around the moon with you and show you all my favorite places. itll be so much fun!!!!!!!!! :D <3 jade

Ow. I think this is the only time John cries in the entire comic.

A Single Tear(™) is a bit of an understated reaction to the death of one of your best friends who you just recently learned is also your twin sister, but to be fair, John isn’t left with very much time to react, as next panel Jack Noir’s sword is pointed at his face.

BRIGHT: John knows about dream selves and waking selves by now, I think?

CHEL: He knows they’re a thing but I don’t think he knows they count as backup lives. AT told Jade dream selves can die separately from regular selves but I don’t think anyone told John.

FAILURE ARTIST: Jack Noir wants the ring, but then he’s stopped by Jade’s gift: a robotic bunny wielding multiple weapons.

They line up for a fight.

Hours in the future, on a destroyed planet, AR wraps police tape around himself and becomes a Aimless Renegade. Before the disaster, he went to the Veil, where he found a sleeping John. He saves John by putting him on a rocket board.

Back to the robotic bunny. Jack Noir flies away from the fight. Grandpa’s battleship lands and Grandpa takes away Jade’s body. Mom and Dad disembark the ship and wave goodbye as it leaves. Grandpa cries a Single Tear as he transports Jade’s already taxidermed body. Did he have a machine?

CHEL: For that matter, why isn’t he helping anyone who’s actually still alive while he’s there?

HURRY UP AND DO NOTHING: 10

FAILURE ARTIST: Nope, transporting a dead body is more important.

Again going back, White Queen leaves Prospit. On landing, she becomes Windswept Questant and wanders the Earth. We go forward years later. She repairs the laboratory and meets up with AR, WV, and PM. WV’s homemade spear hides the ring.

John watches this scene through the clouds of Skaia. He looks at the ring in his hand. In another cloud, there’s Jade’s laboratory. We close in on it and inside is The Fourth Wall. It isn’t turned on, but we are still lead to Andrew Hussie, banging away on a computer keyboard as he recaps the plot for a second time.

CHEL: Which we shall do as well when we’re done with this section, because it’s insanely hard to keep track of everything.

FAILURE ARTIST: Andrew Hussie says Nanna’s comet landed 99 years before John’s “birth” so he has some clue about the age but still doesn’t see it odd that a woman that age has a son who is probably only in his thirties.

CHEL: As I said, it’s also possible Dad was really old too, but that’s never really suggested. Not to mention, since they were brought into existence as toddlers, shouldn’t the kids be noticeably older than the ages given for them? John should be biologically fourteen to fifteen by now and at that age that can make a visible difference. I know the art style doesn’t really give clues, but no one I’ve seen has ever pointed that out in fanfic either.

FAILURE ARTIST: Newborns aren’t distinctive looking and can’t really do the cute things toddlers do. People in TV and movies regularly give birth to six month old infants so it’s not strange.

CHEL: True, but this isn’t TV, it’s a comic, and they don’t have to use an actual infant as a prop here.

BRIGHT: Possibly it’s intentional. Among other things, we see the newly-created players survive short trips through vacuum, crash-land on Earth without even minor injuries, and handle weapons they shouldn’t be able to lift for another four or five years. This could work if players have superhuman abilities (that is, beyond the classpect system). If that was the intent then it really should be made more explicit, though.

Of course, what it really boils down to is that Homestuck runs off Rule of Cool and Rule of Funny, and occasionally breaks down on examination as a result.

On the whole this is a solid Act, I think! We have a lot of new stuff happening, more characters get introduced, and we find out some more about the trolls. It’s much less rambling than Act 1.

COUNTS ALL THE LUCK: 0 ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 18 CALL CPA PLEASE: 8 CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 19 GET ON WITH IT!: 18 GORE GALORE: 10 HOW NOT TO WRITE A WEBCOMIC: 15 HURRY UP AND DO NOTHING: 10 IN HATE WITH MY CREATION: 0 RELATIONSHIP GOALS?: 1 SEND THEM TO THE SLAMMER: 1 SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS: 0 WHAT IS HAPPENING??: 9 WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 19 TOTAL: 127

#homestuck #Let's read #homestuck meta #reread #literary critique #sporking #Homespork

[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

[houkagokappa]

Favourite anime of the decade

Although I only began watching anime in 2013 and thus didn’t think I could make a post like this, I started to think about which shows I would pick if I would make it, and before I knew it I had it composed. I chose the anime that meant the most to me and I feel a strong connection to, not necessarily the ones I think were the best of each year (though in a way they are the same).

The anime for 2010-2012 are series I watched after they originally aired and the anime I picked for 2013-2019 are all series I watched as they aired.

Under the cut because this is super long and incredibly self-indulgent. You’ve been warned.

2010 - Katanagatari

What better way is there to start this list than with Katanagatari, an epic that took the entire year to air.

I watched Katanagatari with my university’s anime association in 2014-2015. I didn’t know anything about it beforehand, which is why I like attending our anime meetings. They’ve introduced me to a lot of great anime I otherwise never would’ve watched (or in this case wouldn’t have discovered until much later).

I love the colourful world and the interesting characters, the banter and all the twists. The ending to Katanagatari is one of the best endings to any anime ever. It’s a great story with a good structure and an amazing conclusion. Nanami is the best girl and we need to treasure her. That’s all.

2011 - Mawaru Penguindrum

What better way is there to continue this list, than with my favourite anime ever?

After watching and falling in love with Utena, I had Penguindrum on my radar, but I didn’t feel rushed to watch it anytime soon. Then one day, about half a year later I saw a gif of Ringo with the burning diary on my dash, which looked super cool and I took it as a sign to finally start the series.

I watched all of Penguindrum over a long weekend in November 2014 at my parents place. I remember being sick, just as I had been when I first watched Utena, which is a weird coincidence and possibly something needed for additional effect. I saw half of it on my laptop in my bed and half of it on our TV in the living room, which I regret, because turns out it’s not the kind of show you want your parents to get glimpses of. I still remember the fear I felt when episode 14 rolled around and my dad was sitting with his back to the TV and I PRAYED that he wouldn’t turn around to question me or why I was watching some animated lesbian bondage infused attempted rape scene... I also don’t know why I thought Penguindrum wouldn’t throw something like that at me, I had seen the previous 13 episodes...

Anyway, that’s my favourite anime of all time, ever. I love all of its themes to death, and it’s such a beautiful and emotional series. I think the first episode is one of the best first episodes of any anime ever and I love how the ending ties back to the very first scene. 

I could write an entire essay on why I love Penguindrum and why it’s the best series ever (well, competing with Utena for that title), but I think anyone reading this already knows why, so I’ll leave you with the funny anecdote above instead. And if you haven’t seen Penguindrum yet do yourself a favor and go watch it NOW. This is the Ringo gif for you!

2012 - Nisemonogatari

I love the Monogatari series. I love the unique animation and visual style, the amazing characters and the fun dialogues. I also really love Nisemonogatari in particular and I’m sad how it’s often dismissed for being the least interesting season or for being nothing but fanservice. I watch Monogatari specifically for the dialogue (and visuals). I don’t care about the plot as much as I care about the character interactions and Nisemonogatari delivers with those. More specifically I appreciate how well it divides the time spent with each girl. Later on in the series there are long breaks where some of the characters don’t appear at all and I end up missing them, but with Nisemonogatari we get a little bit of everyone (of those who have appeared so far). Of course it’s also great how Nisemonogatari introduces us to some new characters and upcoming plot points and contains a lot of cool foreshadowing, but that’s beside the point. All I want is the dialogue. I don’t even care what they’re talking about, Monogatari manages to make anything interesting.

I watched all of Monogatari during my spring break (lol) in 2015. I also watched it at my parents place, on the TV in our living room, which was great because Monogatari deserves a bigger screen. This time around I was older and wiser and didn’t have my parents around. It was just me and my sister and although Bakemonogatari impressed me so much I tried to make her interested in it, I wasn’t successful with that so I got to watch it in peace (peace). (In hindsight, with consideration for what was to come, that was probably for the best).

As another fun fact I should add that although I was super impressed with Monogatari, I didn’t consider myself a die-hard fan until a year or so later. I was happy to watch Owarimonogatari in the fall, and glad to see the announcement for the Kizumonogatari movies that came after it, but I wasn’t over the moon thrilled about it until I actually watched the first movie. It had to grow on me a little bit, which isn’t unusual when it comes to my favourites. I loved Utena the first time I saw it, but it took months for my obsession to build and grow and fully develop. Maybe because they’re both shows that leave the viewer with a lot to think about, so you only realise their full brilliance later on?

2013 - Kill la Kill

I began watching anime in the spring of 2013, when Shingeki no Kyojin, Free! and Dangan Ronpa began airing, because Homestuck went on a hiatus and that’s what the content on my dash changed into. I also began attending conventions and in January 2014 I went to Yukicon. At the con I ran into an acquaintance of mine and joined her gang, who decided to go and listen to a panel called “Kill la Kill - is this how Trigger saved anime?”. I would never had gone there on my own, since I wasn’t watching Kill la Kill or interested in starting it, but I’m glad I did because that was my first proper introduction to Kill la Kill and what ultimately sparked my interest for it.

When I tried the first episode I didn’t like it a whole lot. I hated the style, it was so sketchy and ugly and the fanservice made me uncomfortable. However, the first episode was really good at setting up the story and I was curious to see how it would continue so I kept watching. I didn’t love the following episodes either, but there was something that compelled me to keep watching and 4 or 5 episodes in I began liking it once the story and Ryuko’s personality had managed to fully suck me in. I binged the first half until I was caught up with the airing episodes and then I had fun waiting for the new episodes each week. I don’t remember much more about my initial reactions, but because it’s one of the first anime I ever saw and one of the first airing anime I ever followed it’ll always have a special place in my heart.

I’ve since rewatched Kill la Kill multiple times and it still holds up. I love the crazy energy, all the different personalities and characters and the amazing twists. I also grew to love the style, it’s very distinct and now that I’ve seen more anime I appreciate it all the more.

Having loved Kill la Kill and hearing so much about Trigger, I started to follow them and make sure to watch everything else they would put out. I like to think that we both started out at the same time, because this was their first anime as a new studio and one of the first anime I followed. Trigger has a special place in my heart as much as Kill la Kill does.

2014 - Selector Infected WIXOSS

Battoru battoru!

Selector Infected WIXOSS is probably the least known anime on this list. I was introduced to it by a friend who at the time watched everything that aired. She sold it to me as a Madoka-ripoff (knowing I was a huge fan), which it kinda is, but also not at all and people should stop using that phrase. It’s about girls who make wishes and suffer, but that’s where the similarities end. It’s also very much what I’m into, I love a good show with dark and somewhat taboo topics, lesbian undertones and all that jazz. It got a second season which concludes the story, but any continuation past that is not worth anyone’s time.

It was written by Mari Okada and made to sell cards. I own a set and I’m still waiting for the day when I get to play with them.

2015 - Hibike! Euphonium

Hibike! Euphonium is another anime that I watched and liked, then loved, then became absolutely obsessed over long after it had already ended. I picked it up only because it was a music anime and I had just finished Shigatsu wa Kimi no Uso and was in the mood for another similar show. (I also picked up ShigaUso on a whim, because someone I followed on tumblr was hyping it up as a music lover). I’m not a musician, but I loved the series regardless and ended up relating to Kumiko and her struggles like I’ve never related to anyone before (even though the specifics of our struggles are somewhat different). Hibike! Euphonium is one of the first pieces of media that made me cry, not over a sad scene, but over a emotionally charged one when Kumiko realises she wants to succeed, she wants to win and get better and put her whole heart into her playing. (I vividly remember telling my friend about how an anime made me cry and being super embarrassed to reveal which one, because it was so new and personal to me).

Hibike! Euphonium is a beautifully made, incredibly touching anime. It’s done with so much care and so much love. I also have a lot of precious memories attached to it; I went to Kyoto for a student exchange and took the opportunity to spend an entire day in Uji, where Hibike! Euphonium takes place. I visited most of the locations seen in the anime, cried about how ridiculously realistic everything is, sat on Kumiko’s bench by the river, randomly met up with some Japanese fans and ended the day on top of Mt. Daikichi, as seen in episode 8. It was one of the best days in my life!

2016 - Doukyuusei

I was introduced to Doukyuusei through the Penguindrum tag on tumblr. Either tumblr was broken (very likely) or someone was spamming it (also very likely), but there were a couple of posts promoting Doukyuusei that showed up in the tag CONSTANTLY. They weren’t terribly out of place because the director of Doukyuusei (Nakamura Shouko) was previously known for her work on Penguindrum, but I should add that there were so many of those posts, actual Penguindrum posts (which there weren’t many of to begin with) disappeared among them, which made me quite annoyed with Doukyuusei.

Then the trailer came out and I watched it and it seemed pretty cool. I think I even glanced at the manga, but I didn’t think much of it. Then the anime came out and everyone was sharing gifs from it and they looked so good I watched the movie as soon as I could. Even though the quality of the first stream I found wasn’t great I loved it and watched it again as soon as I finished it the first time, and then again the next day when a better stream came out.

By reblogging Doukyuusei a mutual started talking about it with me and our conversation made me pick up the manga again, mainly since I found out that there’s a continuation to the story. Now that I properly read it I really fell in love with it and Nakamura Asumiko’s artstyle. I also find it funny how when I looked her up in order to find out about her other works, I realised I had looked her up before thanks to her joint project with Ikuhara. Back then I wasn’t in the mood to read Nokemono to Hanayome and I didn’t care for “some BL mangaka” to continue checking her out, but now that I’d found her again it all came back to me. I think it’s really neat and funny how I’ve been introduced to her through Ikuhara several times over!

Back to Doukyuusei, I love it a lot because it’s a very sweet and simple story. It feels realistic. I like the flow of time, or rather how it skips forward a lot and we only get small glimpses of the more important moments in their relationship, along with some of the small cute ones. It’s not an amazingly unique story, but it feels very refreshing, maybe because of how basic it is. I’m not sure how to best describe it, but at the end of the day it’s a very wholesome story about two boys who fall in love and there aren’t that many of those, especially not any that have gotten anime adaptations.

It’s quite short for a movie, which makes it very easy to watch. I’ve lost count how many times I’ve seen it. During my exchange, I spent 10 days in Tokyo at an Airbnb that asked me not to stream anything, so in order to have something to do in the evenings I downloaded Doukyuusei and watched it every other night. I also used to watch it at least every month for more than a year and as a general pick-me-up whenever I was feeling down. I know the entire movie by heart by now.

2017 - Owarimonogatari 2nd season

I already shared how I got into Monogatari and why I love it so much. Yet, or precisely therefore it shows up on this list again (though all things considered it should be a bonus instead of an entry). The second season to Owarimonogatari is an amazing conclusion to an amazing series (not that it’s the conclusion at all). Hachikuji is my favourite character so it was great to see her again after so long (see my comments about Nisemonogatari) and I’m still crying over the brilliance of her kamimashita gag. It was also very rewarding to get an end to the mystery that was Ougi.

The anime came out while I was on a field course in Tvärminne. I remember it well, because I had the luxury of having a room to myself and an entire afternoon to chill there. I began watching it and had a really good time doing so until a classmate of mine came knocking on my door, asking me to join him in some game and I had to choose between being social or watching the long awaited new season of Monogatari. It was a tough choice to leave Hachikuji behind (I’M SO SORRY), but I ditched her and joined them. After that I didn’t have enough time to finish the series, until it was time for us to leave. I couldn’t get a car ride all the way to Helsinki, but I managed to get one to the Inkoo library and my dad to pick me up from there maybe an hour or two later which was the perfect time and perfect place to continue watching Monogatari. I really haven’t learned anything when it comes to watching possibly questionable anime with other people around. Luckily no one lives in Inkoo, so I got to watch it entirely undisturbed. Good memories indeed.

2017 BONUS - Eromanga-sensei

Look. I couldn’t honestly write this list without including Eromanga-Sensei. I unironically like the series. It began when I read the LN just to pass the time and have something to laugh at. Then the anime got announced and I knew I’d watch it, but I wasn’t really into it yet (the LN’s aren’t that good). Then they made a figure of Sagiri and I got it because I really love her design and then I started to look forward to the anime more, because I began having certain expectations for it and suddenly I’m here blogging about my first impressions of it (which are now lost forever, yay!).

I actually find the story to be quite touching and I got emotional watching the anime. Sagiri and Masamune have lost and gained their families multiple times over and now with all their parents dead it’s just the two of them left, both desperate and scared and unsure, wanting to find and create a new family and sense of belonging for themselves. It’s also a really well-made series, all the production values are top notch, the animation is fluid, the music is nice and the voice acting is great. It’s pretty funny and although none of the characters are particularly likeable, it’s an enjoyable series to watch. You can’t take it too seriously though. I had a really fun time with it, mostly because I made myself have a good time with it. I didn’t care about any of the memes and I got made fun of by all my friends, but that’s what I mostly remember 2017 anime for. I can’t wait for the second season, which we will inevitable get!!

2018 - 3-gatsu no Lion 2nd Season

3-gatsu no Lion is another anime that grew on me over time. I had difficulties watching and finishing both seasons, because at times it’s a really slow series, but I still consider it one of my favourites and one of the best series ever made. The second season was even better than the first and I sincerely hope we’ll get a third, and a fourth and a fifth or however many are required to finish the entire story.

Shaft has again done an incredible job with the visuals. I love the entire production, the music and voice acting and the overall feeling. The bullying arc was amazing, super emotional and raw and I love how it dealt with the aftermath and how there wasn’t a simple solution and how everything didn’t get fixed overnight, because that’s not how it works in real life. I love how Rei got a lot of personal growth. I love seeing him starting to rely on others more and become more comfortable with himself and what he likes and wants. It’s incredible how all the characters are multifaceted and how 3-gatsu makes me care for them (I’m cheering on you, pidgeon-man!). The Kawamoto family emits so much warm and positive energy I can’t help but cry everytime I see them. In fact, I used to prepare for each episode by making myself a nice, often Japanese styled meal, since there’s such a huge focus on delicious looking food in the anime I would always get hungry watching it, and a packet of tissues because I would cry every. single. week. It was ridiculous.

It’s not an easy series to get into, but probably the only series I feel the need to recommend to everyone I meet, just because it really is an amazing series that explores the human psyche and an incredibly rewarding watch once you get into it.

2019 - Sarazanmai

Do I even need to write something here? Anime of the decade, no question about it. 

There’s something really special in being able to follow an anime project you’re passionate about right from the start and I’m glad I got to do it with an Ikuhara project, because his anime is on a whole other level and speaks to me in ways no other media does. This was also the first time I took on such an active role in the fandom, which has been incredibly fun, but a bit taxing as well. However, if there is an anime that gets better once you share your thoughts on it with others each week, it’s Ikuhara’s.

Sarazanmai ended up being what I expected and nothing like it. I don’t know how, but it managed to exceed my expectations, even though they were skyhigh and I was worried about getting let down, especially since Yurikuma Arashi didn’t live up to my expectations for it. Sarazanmai however, was everything I wanted and more.

I love the story and themes, I love the characters, I love how there was so much going on, but they managed to make it work and have a satisfying ending. The musical numbers were insanely good and I love all the crazy shirikodama shenanigans. Watching Sarazanmai is like being on an emotional rollercoaster, with just the right amount of everything. I can’t wait to see what Ikuhara comes up with in the next decade!!

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If you’ve read this far, thank you for your time. I hope you enjoyed this and I applaud you for getting through all of it. If you feel like it, please share your picks with me, I’m curious to see what they are!

#my nonsense #anime #anime of the decade #should i spoil it and tag them all? #i kinda want to #also none of the anime on this list comes as a surprise if you know me or have been following me for a long time #katanagatari #mawaru penguindrum #nisemonogatari #klk #wixoss #hibike! euphonium #doukyuusei #owarimonogatari #eromanga sensei #3 gatsu no lion #sarazanmai #i hope you don't mind that i didn't properly introduce any of the series #i kinda assume everyone knows them all since i blog about them so much #and i think it's more interesting to think back on my experiences with them #you can always look up plots or more specific recommendations elsewhere #long post

[weaselandfriends]

Hymnstoke Intermission

Andrew Hussie had the courtesy to drop some thoughts on the Epilogues, the full text of which can be found here. As you can probably tell, it’s dense, so I’ll summarize what I consider the key points.

1. Hussie intended the Epilogues to be “conceptually distinct” from the main narrative of Homestuck (i.e., Acts 1 through 7).

2. Hussie intended the Epilogues to set new narrative stakes and establish a way for the narrative to continue (as opposed to the traditional idea of an “Epilogue” as something that resolves what came before).

3. By labeling the Epilogues as “Epilogues” while not adhering to traditional expectations of what an epilogue entails, Hussie intended to prompt readers to question storytelling concepts and the agenda of the storyteller.

4. Hussie intended to cede his authorial control over the Homestuck story and “pass the torch” to the fandom.

5. Hussie intended to prompt the fandom to develop skills like “critical discussion, dealing constructively with negative feelings resulting from the media they consume, interacting with each other in more meaningful ways, and trying to understand different points of view outside of the factions within fandom that can become very hardened over time.”

I actually disagree with several of Hussie’s conclusions, which probably sounds hilariously presumptuous. But if Hussie truly wants the fandom to develop skills in critical discussion, and to foster and understand different viewpoints, while also ceding his authorial control over the work, then his word being “Word of God” has to be called into question. Act 6 of Homestuck already does this; Hussie’s author avatar is literally killed followed by a flash titled DOTA. DOTA, of course, being short for “Death of the Author,” a frequently-cited essay by Roland Barthes that argues that author's intentions can neither be wholly known nor taken as the sole interpretation of a work.

It’s arguable whether Hussie’s shout out to this essay is meant to be an endorsement of its thesis, and I think a claim could be made that the DOTA in Homestuck is inherently parodic; Hussie’s author avatar continues to exist and influence the story even after his “death,” and at times (such as the Meenah walkarounds) the author avatar appears to give direct statements of the author’s intentions behind certain creative decisions. In fact, the DOTA flash itself marks one of the Hussie avatar’s most direct interactions with the story, as it is during this flash that he gives Vriska the Ring of Life.

Even now, Hussie’s actions contradict his claims, at least to some extent; he cedes narrative control and promotes differing critical interpretations at the same time he dumps a tremendous block of text explaining the intentions and goals of his work. An author’s statement on “what the story means” usually affirms his or her control and quashes differing viewpoints, after all. But it’s not something new. Homestuck has always blurred the line behind author and fan. Some of Hussie’s statements I don’t take as major revelations but rather reiterations of themes that have been clear since Act 1.

If you have read my more recent Hymnstoke posts, you can probably guess which of Hussie’s points I disagree with. In particular, I think the Epilogues are too thematically important to Homestuck to be treated with the kind of “take it or leave it”/“canon or non-canon” ambivalence Hussie claims in his post. Or maybe it’s more that I wish it didn’t have that kind of ambivalence? Because his logic is sound; the Epilogues are presented in a way that sets them apart from “Homestuck Proper.” The AO3 fan fiction cover page, the prose, the way they’re organized as a distinct entity on the website, all of these elements contribute to and support Hussie’s claim of separation. Perhaps, then, my counterargument is that the Epilogues shouldn’t have been displayed this way; that they should have been a fundamental part of the story, one that is unquestionably considered “canon.”

Without the Epilogues, the ending of Homestuck is bad. Really bad. Game of Thrones bad. The original ending of Homestuck fails Homestuck on every conceivable level. It’s a poor resolution of the plot, as it relies on a deus ex machina (Alt!Calliope) while leaving tons of smaller narrative elements completely unresolved. It’s a poor resolution of the characters, as most of them wind up being irrelevant (even those given absurd amounts of screen time, like Jake) and their personal issues are resolved off-screen during a timeskip. It’s a poor resolution of the themes, as despite constant statements that one can’t cheat their way to “development,” that is exactly what happens when Vriska is revived and fixes everyone’s problems instantly. It’s a poor resolution of the structure or form, as what was a tightly-wound machine narrative that relied on innumerable tiny parts sliding into perfect order ended with a big dumb fight scene where people just whap each other over and over until the good guys whap hard enough to win. Beyond the fact that the ending is “happy,” I still can’t find much good to say about it even after years of turning it over in my head.

And during the hiatus-strewn period that marked Homestuck’s end, Hussie was noticeably scant on dropping essays about his intentions.

The Epilogues redeem so much of what went wrong with the ending of Homestuck. I won’t delve into the specifics in this post, as I should probably save it for a more comprehensive series of posts about the Epilogues. But from that perspective, it feels to me as though the Epilogues should not be divorced from Homestuck so thoroughly.

But see, my disagreement with Hussie on this point is a bit disingenuous for another reason. Because, like his claims of ceding authorial control, he’s contradictory here too. Consider these points:

1. Hussie intended the Epilogues to be the launching point of future story developments.

2. Hussie, ceding his own control, intended these future developments to be created by the fans.

3. Hussie designed the Epilogues so that the fans could accept or deny them outright, consider them “canon” or “non-canon.”

If the Epilogues are the breeding ground for Homestuck’s future, then that part of the fandom that denies them renders themselves inert. Without the Epilogues, Homestuck is over. It’s done. The window of our Pynchonian party is closed. All life has petered out; no energy enters to sustain it. The Epilogues open the window. Denying the Epilogues kills the story, and thus the fandom; accepting them leaves room open for the future. And if the part of the fandom that rejects the Epilogues withers and dies, that means only the fandom that accepts them will remain. Ultimately, the Epilogues will be considered canon by the Homestuck fandom, because those who disagree will no longer be part of the fandom, at least the active one.

That probably sounds imperious. But it’s not something I want; the people who deny the Epilogues ought to have a voice as well, and nobody is stopping them from providing their opinions. But I have a hard time imagining that people who deny the Epilogues will stick around in a fandom for a work now defined by the Epilogues. As such, many of Hussie’s conciliatory claims fall flat or seem overly idealistic. Can the fandom continue as a divided house on such a fundamental line when future developments to the Homestuck story will be based on the Epilogues? The canonical arguments for which books belonged in the Bible did not end in blithe harmony; one viewpoint prevailed and all schismatics extinguished. Obviously there will be no burnings at the stake over Homestuck canon, but in a world where there are so many options for entertainment, those who do not accept Homestuck’s active element will probably leave of their own volition.

There's also a third option, expressed by one of the commentators on the Reddit thread I link at the beginning of this post.

Here's my suggestion for you, Hussman. Big subversion, you'll like it: Make "Homestuck 2" and then not have anything form [sic] Homestuck in it at all and just make the story you actually want to make.

The Homestuck fandom might die, but the “Hussie” fandom will survive, as long as Hussie himself continues to create art. Before the Epilogues, I often expressed a similar sentiment. I wanted Hussie to get away from Homestuck, make something new, even if it was just something short and far less ambitious than Homestuck. I think Hussie is a strong storyteller and writer in his own right, and he did not merely “get lucky” with Homestuck the way a hack gets lucky when their trashily-written novel strikes a perfect chord with the culture and sells millions. If Hussie does actually intend to cede authorial control and leave Homestuck to the fandom, then what is his next move? Retirement at 40? I hope not.

Those were my hastily-written thoughts on Hussie’s commentary. While at times contradictory, I consider Hussie’s claims and actions in line with themes established throughout Homestuck. But I also question whether his storytelling decisions will be able to achieve the result he desires for the fandom.

Whether he or we can achieve it, I do agree with Hussie’s hope to create a fandom that is smarter, more willing to view the work with a critical lens, to discuss with one another, to understand each other’s viewpoints, to deal with difficult subject matter. I think a lot of people can be scared to delve deeply into a work, either because they only want their entertainment to be light escapism or because they feel gatekept by not knowing a lot about literary criticism as a field of study. Maybe escapism is fine, but it’s not the only use of art. Treat the stories you like as art and really ask yourself what you like about them, what makes them good, and especially what it means that those things make it good. Those questions will serve a fitting substitute for an understanding of postmodern literary trends of the 20th century.

#homestuck #hymnstoke

[betweengenesisfrogs]

The Future of This Blog: A Retrospective, Or: Dubiously Useful Notes on the Epilogues

Q: What’s next for this blog?

Q: Are you going to discuss the Epilogues?

A: Good questions!!!

The Epilogues may have killed me. They resemble two dogs who each put a sword through my chest and slew me with a Heroic death and a Just one, respectively. They are unfathomably powerful and should be feared by all. Genesis frogs lie destroyed in their wake.

I say this as someone who genuinely adores them and thinks they’re great. (For the most part, with a few frustrations and quibbles. I guess that’s Homestuck in a nutshell for you. ) I think they do amazing things.

I just don’t know what I want to say about them, or indeed, if I have anything to say.

Mainly, it’s that, as I suspected would happen, the landscape of Homestuck analysis has changed in their wake.

The original impetus for this blog, back in 2017, was that people were Wrong About Homestuck. People are still Wrong About Homestuck today, but in a totally different way, which I feel less equipped to engage with.

For the last few years, I think my primary motivation was to argue against what the Perfectly Generic Podcast has called “The It’s Not That Deep Crowd.” Those who saw Homestuck, especially Act 6, as meaningless random mess, or a failure born of creator laziness. My goal was to counter that by articulating the many themes and conceptual threads that give structure to Act 6 Homestuck, so that people would recognize how much is going on within it. In doing this, I grew to align myself with Team Homestuck is Good. I do think late Homestuck is much more good than bad, but in retrospect that wasn’t really what drove me. What drove me was frustration at the It’s Not That Deep Crowd (which was strongly aligned with Team Homestuck is Bad) for their refusal to engage with Homestuck, to recognize that it was trying to do specific, deliberate things. I would have welcomed someone saying that Homestuck ultimately failed, if they were willing to take on the complexity of that failure, but no one seemed to.

So I wrote a whole bunch of essays, some better than others, to try and get a sense of Homestuck’s thematic complexity out into the world somehow. I’d like to think I succeeded, though of course I wasn’t the only one.

Things are very different now, Post-Epilogues. The border lines of the fandom have totally shifted. First, the It’s Not That Deep Crowd have been pretty exhaustively refuted, in part because the Epilogues established from the get-go that, yes, we were indeed dealing with themes of metafiction, fandom, demiurgic oppression and personal potential. At the same time, many of those who were on Team Homestuck is Bad totally warmed to the Epilogues and returned to the fandom, while some part of those who were beating the drum for Homestuck is Good had a strongly negative reaction to the Epilogues, and now comprise Team Epilogue Bad.

I’m delighted by the former and wistful though not surprised about the latter. I’m just not sure how to engage with the new place we’re in. Previously, I felt I could explain things people didn’t understand, and help them more deeply appreciate Homestuck.

With the Epilogues, it’s more like: either you’re into it, or you’re not. There are things you have to think about quite a bit to understand, true, but I also think there are people who get what the Epilogues are going for and just don’t enjoy it.

Honestly? I find that completely understandable. As I alluded to above, the Epilogues carry an unfathomably powerful destructive, negative energy. They are meant as a provocation, a violent act of storytelling that Hussie codes Meat (okay, also Candy) and likes to do after a pause of any significant length. They deliberately tear down many of our hopes and dreams for these characters and offer a contrary opinion. I admire the audacity. I’m also completely sympathetic to being horrified by this.

The night the full epilogues came out, I finished them late in the evening and spent the whole night wrestling with a powerful, dark emotion. A kind of grief and awe and horror, all at the same time. It took me a long time to fall asleep, and when I slept, they were very uneasy dreams. In the weeks that followed, I remember thinking, over and over: I’m glad I gave this time to Homestuck, but I need a long, long break from it. I loved the Epilogues, but I don’t think I could ever read them again. I felt utterly full of Homestuck, and wanted not to write, think, or do anything more with it for a long time, until I finally digested the darn thing.

So, about how you’d feel if you gorged yourself on a hundred pounds of candy and raw meat in one night.

Others seem to have reported similar experiences. Dirk’s words about Detective Pony: a gripping, cathartic read, draining in the best way possible—these come to mind. I’m not surprised that fandom reactions have been so passionate, so overwhelmed, and so vehement.

So I find it harder to be critical of Team Epilogue Bad than Team Homestuck Bad. I think I understand exactly where they’re coming from. I may not see the Epilogues quite the same way, but I don’t really feel the need to tell these folks they’re wrong, either.

Weirdly, that means I don’t feel as strong a need to talk about the Epilogues. The ideas I wanted to put out there are out there. What there is to say about the Epilogues has already been said, by people who’ve said these things much better than I could. It feels like the community doesn’t need me anymore. My work here is done.

So I don’t know how much I’m going to continue writing here. This coincides with a drop-off in my internet activity in general and with me putting more effort into personal career goals. Plus, a break from Homestuck has felt like the right thing for the last month, and may be the right thing for a while.

Probably what’s most likely though, is that I keep reblogging the most interesting essays on Homestuck, and maybe offer my own opinion occasionally, in a much more scattershot, spur-of-the-moment way than before, if I feel like I have something to say.

I do have an additional short-ish Epilogue thought coming later today, for instance, so look forward to that.

The last thing I want to say here is: if you’ve chosen to declare the Epilogues non-canon, to erase them from your idea of Homestuck, and keep creating your own worlds, futures, and afterlives for these characters—

Not only do I support that, I think that might be precisely the point.

The Epilogues begin with a detailed discussion of the ambiguous and contested relationship they have to previous Homestuck canon, and are described as being “of dubious authenticity.” They are, explicitly, Homestuck fanfiction, while also being a continuation of the story. There’s really nothing else like them in literature. Sure, the Meat timeline is described as “canon” by merit of its connections to the Lord English story, but the bizarre, fanfic-like Candy timeline is entangled with it, as are all other possible realities. Ultimately the word canon ceases to mean “what is real within a given story” and becomes something far stranger and much more ambiguous.

How do we determine what’s real/canonical within Homestuck? It’s just as Rose teaches us: it’s what’s true, essential, and relevant. In other words, what is meaningful to us as readers. So, by definition, the Epilogues are as real as you want them to be.

I wrestled a lot with the discrepancy between the darkness of the Epilogues and the utopian, transcendent Gnostic themes that permeate Act 6 Homestuck. I think the answer is this: the utopia, the transcendence for these characters lie largely in what we, the readers imagine for them.

As writers and artists and fanfiction readers, we have always created the futures for these beloved characters, and that’s exactly what we’ll continue to do.

I mean, the Epilogues themselves are fanfiction, created by fans, presenting us with two very provocative AUs. It’s hard to get more fan-made than that.

It’s a nice way of solving the problem I alluded to here. Homestuck gets to have it both ways, and so do we.

I leave you with my favorite example of fan-created transcendence, The Pumpkin Path, currently available as a draft on OptimisticDuelist’s Patreon and hopefully everywhere soon.

If you’re interested in deepening your understanding of the Epilogues (love them or hate them), OptimisticDuelist and the Perfectly Generic Podcast continue to do amazing work carrying the Homestuck conversation into the future, and following them will connect you to a rich, thriving Homestuck interpretive community. For now, I’m more than happy to leave the conversation in their hands.

See you when I see you!

As always, thanks for playing.

<3 Ari

#about the blogger #homestuck epilogues #homestuck analysis #gnostic influences #homestuck fandom #homestuck canon #state of the blog #homestuck fandom meta #looking back #looking forward #long live Homestuck