#(also way too logical good lord reading these back it looks like im writing a scientific paper…fucking hell…… [astonished affectionate])

[sunlightfeeling]

…it kinda looks like tsuyoshi kicked takuya’s hands off of him based on how takuya shakes his hands afterward…

call him tsudonkshi

(tsuyoshi + donkey)

[roxilalonde]

[S]:Collapse

mayhaps im just repeating what someone else has already said and said better but [S]:Collide needed to be way smarter than it was 

like. i genuinely think hussie wrote the scene and its prior framing around the striders, terezi, vriska, and john and/or roxy, and then tossed in the rest w/o regard to what could reasonably be deemed a satisfying ending to their arcs.

here’s what could have been tighter:

jake and karkat

so we get jake and karkat in what is ostensibly the most disappointing of all possible ends to their character arcs as people who idolize & emulate their cultures’ respective cults of war - neither a) recognizing that said cult is bullshit, a la the infamous Dave vs. Heteronormativity pesterlog, or b) fulfilling the ideal, i.e., actually doing something heroic requiring combative/physical strength. they take out the Felt. which, ok, sure, but there’s a narrative misstep in pitting your two characters with most aspirations to prove themselves in the field of battle against your weakest enemy for their final portrayed conflict.

put it this way: when karkat talks to meenah he’s clearly still putting a lot of onus on being The One, the guy who fights the big bad, so he can justify his own existence to himself. this is a big problem for karkat - he perceives himself as weak, because of alternia’s unreasonable standards of strength and bravery, so to face LE is to prove his dead planet wrong. he makes a point of it. and then, right before he’s supposed to - nope! he’s fighting a bratty green smuppet. or jake: built up as ultimate superclasspect, in the game-over timeline the big powerhouse in the session: also fighting a bunch of green smuppets! 

and yeah, you could blame it on vriska, but her rant was never narratively treated as bad strategy. even though your most powerful classpect is hitting your least powerful enemy. 

vriska

first of all, see previous: vriska isn’t a good strategist. she puts her weak players (which is vriska. vriska is a weak player, compared to the other people on the battlefield) against the strongest enemies, and her strongest players against the weakest. her arrogance gets in the way of critical thinking. nobody has a problem with this. 

she and terezi don’t get a resolution. vriska isn’t held accountable for the shit that she’s done to the other members of her party. she’s not held accountable for her relationship with terezi (how did that evolve? what changed about them? is she less reactionary? the wonders of a retcon that makes defunct three years of character development) the only place she gets closure is in a dream bubble, and even then, that’s (vriska).

finally: vriska deploying the weapon against lord english is interesting. it fits her, as the person who’s always trying to shove herself into plot developments headfirst. on the other hand: vriska shouldn’t have succeeded. it validates her previous efforts to shove herself into the action - it’s like the narrative is saying, “yes, vriska is so good at this, look at how successful she is when she tries to be the protagonist.” ignoring that a critical part of vriska’s character is that whenever she tries to do something like that, people get hurt. because vriska’s mistake is assuming her importance comes prior to others’ safety. throughout the story we’ve been told “vriska should under no circumstances be allowed to play protag,” and here she is, successfully playing protag.

jane

i would probably have written some pretty scathing analysis here if there was anything involving jane to fucking critique

in all seriousness: jane is sidelined (big surprise) and gets a brief, decent moment with Nannasprite about her issues adjudicating how passive/active to be in her own life. it’s a good moment for the Jane Collective. 

but she doesn’t kill the condesce. i can see why - she’s needed to run around healing people. but if nannasprite can do the exact same thing, there’s no reason that jane, who has the best reason to resent the condesce, shouldn’t be the one to fight her. and yet here we are. jane is the “main” of the alpha session. why is her “big moment” having another version of herself telling her how much cooler she is and then going off to be a passive aid? shouldn’t jane’s conclusion be, “wow, I should involve myself in battles that have personal value to me,” and go off to fight up the condesce?

then dad comes back. which, for a story about growing up - the point is that the kids are learning to live without their parents. there are a lot of allusions in homestuck to the game accelerating maturity: forcing them to “parent” a new world, develop extraordinary skills, growing as a person in accordance with the demands of their classpect. dad coming back alleviates jane of the need to do that: every other parent in homestuck dies. let that sink in. jane’s dad is the only parent who survives, and it’s not clear why. jane should be allowed to mature with the rest of her friends. it’s a feel-good moment, of course, but it’s a regression. what’s driving jane is no longer her dad’s welfare (we should hope); it’s the fate of the new universe. jane’s father should not be her reward. jane’s reward should be her friends’ safety, and the ability to progress as a person - i.e., leave the game. 

kanaya

the thing about strife animations is that we don’t have much time to actually see what’s going on. so for all i know, kanaya and rose were really critical to that battle. and it was really lucky they were there. but for the most part, they were side characters in an animation that concluded with roxy’s triumph. 

kanaya is interesting because the bounds of her mortality are not established. she survives eridan’s blast to the torso but not an incinerating laserbeam, so where does that line fall? pitting her against the condesce is on the one hand, a good decision, narratively (condesce comes from kanaya’s planet, kanaya’s problem; also, it’s clearly established that the condesce is capable of killing kanaya, raising the stakes); on the other hand, it’s hampered by the format. the GO timeline was told mostly in panels. that way, we felt the emotional impact. in [S]:Collide, kanaya could have come close to dying multiple times! as could rose have! our only definitive moments are her pausing in the middle of a battle to apply lipstick or read a book. which is, y’know, pretty funny, i admit! but also not conclusive.

meh, but not critical flaws:

rose: rose’s main power has always been as a strategist, informant, and manipulator of outcomes, and even though she’s formidable in battle, her time to shine should’ve been negotiating how things worked out. which is why i’m baffled that of everyone on that meteor, neither of the seers was the one managing strategy. amazing

terezi: her one-sided pesterlog with vriska was good in the same way the striders�� was good, but unlike the striders’, it’s never resolved, because it’s one-sided. the subject of her idealization is not there to disconfirm her idealizations. she also should have taken over strategy, she is far better than vriska at it

jade: i wish jade had a better-built arc. i’m not saying jade is unlikable or even a bad character it’s just that she does not have notable internal conflict or any struggle against societal norms to motivate her. her main problem is loneliness. but does she discuss that? does she get a resolution?? does she have personal problems derived from loneliness as a child that make her struggle to interact with people in person??? who knows, not the reader

here’s what did work:

roxy vs. the condesce. the condesce is the one who screwed up roxy’s planet; the condesce fucked with roxy’s friends in the GO universe, which only roxy remembers; the condesce subsequently killed rose, right before roxy’s eyes. roxy has reason to be in this fight. we establish early on in her story that roxy and the condesce are direct antagonists to each other and here we close that arc. good writing!

the striders. their chatlog was a detailed and satisfying ending to the strider brothers’ struggle with heteronormativity and flawed role models. “fuck being too cool for that” is a beautiful line in the context of their stories and their affirmation of being awesome without being ‘cool’ is fantastic. the way they work together in the last battle is touching and nice to watch. good writing! could have used more of it.

john. john’s role all along has been to be a friendleader, not a warrior. his minor role in the fighting coupled with his (debatably successful) speech prior makes for a decent finale. (later then we get john ft. Depression in the credits, but i’m not tackling the credits). i have no objections, but maybe that’s because the audience is never supposed to care about john’s development in the same way we care about the strilondes’ and the patron trolls’.

does it matter?

there’s an answer to all this that goes along the lines of “homestuck always defies convention, that’s why it’s lovable,” and while i can see the argument, a) this is really just me outlining why i, personally, am annoyed as fuck, which is to say that i, personally, do not always find it lovable, and b) convention exists for a reason. “convention” isn’t always an antiquated set of constraints aiming to to weigh down fresh creative thinkers; it can be a useful framework for building a good story. and if you reject that framework without maintaining some of the fundamental parts, you get a sloppy narrative. parallels, story cycles, foreshadowing: all of these things should be used conjunctively to set the stage for your conclusion. the stage was not properly set for [S]:Collide. i’m all for subverting obvious foreshadowing, but there’s a difference between “maybe this character will do X in the future, the text alludes to that possibility” and “it would make logical sense, given this character’s current development, for them to do X in the future.” subverting the former is fine. subverting the latter is messy.

and:

claiming dramatic realism does not alleviate you from the restraints of narrative structure and general good writing you shit

then the writer tries to subvert/avoid critique by giving dave’s spiel on “we aren’t characters, rose, we’re people, we don’t have arcs.” but. i’m sorry, but yes, they are characters. yes, they do have arcs. dave’s declaration of “we’re people” is made obsolete by the blatant falsity of what he’s saying - it’s more darkly funny than a legitimate response to criticism. so, yes, the author has a responsibility to tell a coherent narrative within the confines of his chosen medium. which means that yeah, maybe it’s “realistic” to leave their development dangling somewhere in the middle of Act 6, but that doesn’t mean it’s good.

[auralaet-blog]

Human!Elly x Zen

So my friend @love-elizabeth-the-3rd posed me the question of how human!Elizabeth the 3rd and Zen would end up together. Now before I go into this, it started out because she’s trying to rp as Elizabeth. But as I’m sure you can predict, it’s REALLY hard to do anything significant in an rp as a cat. So we started fleshing stuff out. Here’s a bit of our conversation:

Me: 

And Seven's like teaching Elly all these things like how to game

And how to do all of these silly things

And Jumin's like, "THAT'S NOT PROPER. AND STOP CALLING HER ELLY. HER NAME IS ELIZABETH THE THIRD. E- LIZ-A-BETH THE THIRD. DON'T YOU FORGET IT."

And then he sweeps Elly away from Seven

"Elizabeth, you need to stay away from Seven. He's nothing but trouble. True, he is exceptionally talented, but he's also completely out of line! Young ladies like you shouldn't have to be doing things like this! If you wanted some entertainment, I or V can take you to the theater. Amusement parks aren't proper for young ladies!"

Elly:

Omfgggggggggg

>w<Im loving this kldjfakdfja

You write it so on point omg

Me:

lol That's just how I'd imagine human!Elly universe

Like... I don't want to change things too much from the canonSo I just adjust a little of it

To fit her being human

I think that Jaehee dislikes having to "babysit" her because she's so naive and just innocently curious so she's always prying into things.

And it's so distracting to Jaehee

And Jaehee's like YOUR FRIEND IS STILL MAKING ME WORK YOU'RE A GROWN WOMAN WHY DO I HAVE TO BABYSIT YOU?!

Elly:

looool omg poor Jaehee, at least she doesn't have to deal with cat fur

Me:

lol Yeap. I haven't decided if I'd incorporate something else in there instead. 

Maybe Elizabeth doesn't really know how to deal with perfume so she douses herself with it because she figures if a little smells good, then a LOT will smell fantastic. 

And because of that, it's just ALL OVER JAEHEE'S HOUSE

 Like... you can track Elizabeth through the house by that perfume

 And maybe Zen's allergic to the perfume

And it drives him nuts because he sees her as just another Jumin

And doesn't realize that she's just ridiculously innocent and naive because Jumin is so overprotective

So that’s where we started... and then she asked me about human!Elly x Zen. I’m putting this below because I started and it just grew to huge proportions. Keep reading if you’re interested. Apparently she found it entertaining and asked me to post it, so here we are!

lol Zen x Elly is hilarious Because they'd literally get together because they keep being thrown into contact with each other And there's so much miscommunication at first And Elly just wants everyone to like her And then there's Zen, who is nice to everyone (except Jumin, wth?) And for whatever reason, he avoids her like the plague And finally she corners him and asks him about it And he explodes And then they end up so mad at each other So she tries to not talk to him But at the same time, she can't help but be drawn to him He's so lively and energetic So different from the cold world that she's used to Somehow whenever they're in the same room together with a crowd, they end up near each other. As for Zen At first he thought she was just another Jumin Stuck up trust fund kid But Jaehee asks him to help her out and escort Elly to something because she needed to get some work done And being sympathetic because the trust fund kid overworks Jaehee, he agrees But Elly chooses to go to an orphanage and spend time there with the kids Then she drops by a food bank And then she stops by a community center And Zen is just CONFUSED THIS IS NOT WHAT HE EXPECTED WHERE IS THE RICH GIRL!? Their last stop was at an animal shelter Elly remembers Zen's allergy and tells him that it's fine to stay outside And he's just like... wat? You remembered that?

And then she looks at him confused like, "Yes? Why is that unusual?" Then goes into the shelter Zen's just sitting there in the car really confused and rethinking his original assumptions And then she comes back out of the shelter in a completely separate change of clothes, just as designer as her outfit earlier. And Zen's like, "Oh. I'm not wrong. She's still just a trust fund kid" And he makes a snide remark about her not being able to handle getting her clothes dirty And she gets mad at him as they're driving back Because she changed clothes because she didn't want the fur on her clothes to cause him to start sneezing And so she tells him off and then stomps out of the car, heading back up to her apartment And he's just stunned She was THAT worried about him? And then he starts making efforts to start seeing her more often He's so confused But she's not having ANY of it She doesn't want to see him She doesn't want to deal Because the last time she tried to be nice, he gave her crap He keeps throwing these labels onto her without even knowing her Finally, Zen manages to convince Seven and Jaehee to help him out because he just CANNOT get her out of his head Jaehee took a lot of convincing But Seven was down because anything to get Elly out to have more fun and freedom was good for him! Besides the challenge of breaking past Jumin's security was great Jumin had noticed that Elly had become a lot quieter and wasn't as bright And logically he concluded, based on Zen's constant questions  after her, that it was Zen's fault. FINALLY, Jaehee asks Zen to help her go pick up Elly from a charity ball that she'd gone to. Zen, determined to impress, puts on a nice suit and shows up at the ball to pick her up. Only he's stunned when he gets there He'd always thought she was a princess, but he'd meant that as in she was spoiled But this? She's stunning BEAUTIFUL

And just like that, any reservations that he may have had before is gone. He's in love. Done. Only... she thinks he hates her and she hates him for all of his original presumptions What does he do? He wants to be by her side. The time where she was avoiding him just felt dark... He doesn't want that. Elly hates to admit it, but she kind of misses Zen He seemed to understand more of these emotions that Jumin and her parents felt were childish She'd enjoyed that day out with him. He'd been good company... until the end there. That was exactly the problem though. He thought she was just a spoiled little rich girl. That she was so one dimensional. He never even gave her a chance. It wasn't worth her while So she's waiting to leave the charity ball and one of her father's coworkers came over and stood by her, flirting with her. She tried to politely decline, but he just wouldn't take a hint And that's when Zen finds her At first he's stunned But then he sees the guy hitting on her And it drives ALL of his protective instincts NUTS He charges in there and tells the guy off and drags Elly away, guiding her into the car And just driving away He's so frustrated and annoyed and he just drives Elly's so confused by his actions, but can see the tension rising off of him

So she's quiet because Zen just seems super volatile. And finally the car stops.

They're in Zen's special spot

And Zen gets out of the car and is just pacing like CRAZY

He doesn't know what to say, but he's gotta say something

HOLY COW IS THIS KIDNAPPING?!

BUT I WANNA TELL HER THAT I'M SORRY AND I ACTUALLY LOVE HER

But come on

Be smooth!

You're Zen!

No problem!

Yeah. He blurts out that he's in love with her and he's sorry that he was such a jerk

<.<

Smooth

Real smooth, Zen

And then he's just EMBARRASSED

Because he meant to show her that he was someone she could rely on

But all she's seen are the bad sides of him

But she comes over and hugs him

And tells him that she's been feeling the same way, but she can't do anything about being rich.

Her family just is and she's not going to throw it away when she could be using her high profile name to get attention to these societal problems

And Zen confesses about his family, how hard it's been

How much he misses them

Wants them to accept him and his dreams, but they just wanted a perfect lawyer or doctor son

They end up spending the entire night there, just sitting on the car and talking.

lol Up there all dressed up fancy

And in the morning, he drops her off at her apartment, kissing her hand and asking if she'd be willing to go out with him, to give him a chance.

She's a princess and deserves the world and he's just a flawed and rusty knight in shining armor, but would she PLEASE just give him a chance

And of course, she says yes.

After that, they start dating

Of course, right off the bat, they have to deal with Jumin

Because dear lord, SHE IS PRECIOUS AND YOU DO NOT TOUCH HER ZEN'

STAY AWAY FROM HER

Elly has to intervene and tell Jumin that this is HER life to live and that she loves him like a brother but that doesn't give him the right to control her life

V just wants her happy

Jaehee is SO RELIEVED

Because now, Jumin's not going to tell her that she has to watch over Elly like Elly's a child

And Seven and Yoosung are stoked because now they have the freedom to drag Elly to ALL the fun places

Like AMUSEMENT PARKS

Jumin was not amused

As for Zen and Elly? It took a while and there were more misunderstandings and it was weird to mesh their lives together since they were such high profile people

But they managed

And now, Jumin comes over to visit his "niece" and Zen tries to deal with it, but every so often just kicks Jumin out of the house

"GO GET A CAT AND STOP COMING TO HANG ALL OVER ELLY AND MY DAUGHTER"

And their daughter is just the darling of the RFA

She has white hair from her parents

And the most unique purple eyes, a combination of Elly's blue and Zen's red eyes

And she is the sweetest and most understanding girl in the world

They teach her that money is power, but it's power that you can and should use for others

That you can look good, but you still need to be kind and giving

And every day, Zen is determined to prove to Elly how much he loves her. His armor is less rusty now. It's shinier

And now covered with hearts drawn on by his daughter and wife

THE END