#Homespork

[homespork-review]

HOMESPORK ACT 5 ACT 1: Mobius Double Plusungood, Part 3

TW: """funny""" sexual and physical assault of a child by another child, extreme bullying, extreme ableism, a very brief discussion of shipping characters outside their canon sexuality.

CHEL: We get some implications of the part of troll culture we ended on last time when a slightly baffled-looking Nepeta, watching through the viewport, updates her SHIPPING WALL. Instead of hearts, some of the hypothetical pairings she’s painted are marked with diamonds. What this means will be explained shortly.

I can’t help but feel it’s slightly creepy to hypothetically matchmake your own friends, but I’m pretty sure the other trolls know at least that the shipping wall exists if not exactly which ships they’re in, and they do live in a society in which it’s stated later that mating is mandatory, so it would indeed be helpful to have at least emergency-doable matchmaking done well in advance and they might appreciate the help.

I’d like to take a moment to note a ship at the bottom row, left of centre; GA/Tavros. Hussie, on his Formspring, later said that GA was “obviously” a lesbian, or anyway was only interested in women, which doesn’t have a specific term for it in troll culture. It’s actually hard to tell going by what’s shown in canon, because she only displays specific interest in girls except for in a complicated case we’ll discuss later, but trolls are supposed to be bi-normative, plus it’s not like the male selection here is particularly inspiring, so, yeah, the evidence we actually see isn't conclusively "obvious". The fandom, knowing this, systematically harass anyone who even muses vaguely about the possibility of shipping her with a boy, even if they don't know about that Word of God. This is why I’m wondering whether the trolls knew about the shipping wall, because if they did, we can presume GA didn’t care. For the record, I’m sex-repulsed ace and have in fact written about.my own imaginary persona fucking (admittedly fucking an opposite sex clone of herself, it was a complicated injoke) and my reaction to someone else writing it would depend on context and reason, so I can imagine her reacting similarly, but not everyone would. A similar thing with a canonically gay male character explicitly on-screen not caring about hypothetical shipping of himself with girls comes up much later; he’s not a troll, but his upbringing was troll-influenced (long story).

BRIGHT: Harassing people over the ships they make content for always baffles me. It’s not like fanart/fanfic for a ship which contradicts canon has any effect on the canon, and playing around with character dynamics (often in a pornographic manner) is a major part of fanfic.

CHEL: On top of all this, gender and sexuality are really shaky concepts to even try to apply to a species which reproduces hermaphroditically. On this side of the fourth wall it’s obviously because Hussie is a not-very-reflective cisgender heterosexual man, and didn’t think about it any further than “girls wear skirts, right?” Plenty of people fanwank up possibilities for how it could happen on the other side. I think we may have to make a “What The Fuck Is Alternian Biology And Sociology” post or two separate from the sporking at the very end.

Discourse discussion over! Next page, we see some of the relevant terminology used in troll culture, though we still don’t get any explanation of what any of the words actually mean, which is a tad annoying for new readers. The context is a discussion between Karkat and Vriska about getting her into the game.

BRIGHT: Specifically, Karkat wants Vriska to get Tavros into the game, leading to this exchange…

CG: WHY DO YOU EVEN HATE HIM, IT'S FUCKING RIDICULOUS. CG: IF ANYTHING YOU SHOULD PITY HIM. CG: ESPECIALLY SINCE YOU WERE THE ONE WHO PARALYZED HIM. AG: I know. I don't really understand it. AG: It's just a really special kind of h8! It never goes away and it doesn't make a lot of sense. CG: THIS IS KIND OF A WEIRD TIME TO BE CONFIDING IN ME ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS OF BLACK ROMANCE BUT OK. AG: Oh god, what? CG: I MEAN IF YOU'RE REALLY IMPLYING TAVROS IS YOUR KISMESIS I THINK YOU'RE BRAYING UP THE WRONG FROND NUB. CG: BOTH PARTIES HAVE TO HATE EACH OTHER EQUALLY, I MEAN LIKE TRUE HATE. CG: MAYBE YOUR FEELINGS COME SOMEWHAT CLOSE TO FITTING THE BILL BUT I DON'T THINK HE CAN HATE ANYONE, IT'S WEIRD, HE'S KIND OF BROKEN IN THE HEAD.

Finally, our long-awaited introduction to troll romance!

And the introduction is an effective one. We now know that there’s something called ‘black romance’, that it concerns hate, and that one’s black-romantic partner is a ‘kismesis’. The conversation also flows naturally and fits the characters having it, rather than being an awkward as-you-know infodump, although brace yourselves, there’s one of those coming up. Thirteen is about right for kids starting to have romantic feelings and being confused about it, not wanting to talk about it is pretty normal, and Karkat lecturing people at a good opportunity is absolutely in character.

Karkat goes on to lecture Vriska about the emotions involved in different sorts of romantic relationships, and wow, it really says a lot about troll culture…

CG: OK, MOST PEOPLE WHO HAVEN'T HAD THEIR LOBE STEM CAUTERIZED ARE CAPABLE OF FEELING THE TWO PRIMARY EMOTIONS, HATE AND PITY. CG: PITY IS OF COURSE JUST THE TONED DOWN VERSION OF THE CENTRAL EMOTION, HATE. CG: AND ALL THE NUANCES OF PITY MANIFEST AS VARIOUS OTHER KINDS OF FEELINGS LIKE WHATEVER CHEMICAL REACTIONS TRIGGER MATING FONDNESS OR THE MYSTERIOUS FORCES THAT ARE BEHIND MOIRALLEGIANCE.

CHEL: It’s never really clear if this is just Karkat’s idea of it or if this is how trolls actually work biologically. Trolls do use the word “love” later on, so I always interpreted it as “pity” being a euphemistic term because “love” in such a warlike and oppressive culture could be exploited as a weakness. Fandom has played it with their love actually being based on a weird form of sympathy/seeing the other as needing protection, which is also plausible.

FAILURE ARTIST: I have played with the pity thing before but in retrospect Karkat is the only one who seems to see it that way. Maybe this is all his fake deep teenager view of romance.

BRIGHT: Vriska makes a performance of how bored she is, but Karkat’s on a roll.

CG: A WELL BALANCED PERSON IS IS GOING TO HAVE A GOOD DISTRIBUTION BETWEEN HATE AND THE VARIOUS PITY HUMORS. CG: HAVING A GOOD BALANCE KEEPS ALL THE EMOTIONS SHARPER, SEE I THINK THAT'S YOUR PROBLEM. AG: Oh???????? AG: I hope you know I already wore out some good note-taking pens today. All the pens. AG: All of them. CG: SEE, MY HATE IS LIKE A FINELY TUNED INSTRUMENT BECAUSE I'M AWARE OF THESE PRINCIPLES. CG: I COULD HATE A HOLE IN PARADOX SPACE ITSELF, STRAIGHT THROUGH TO A NEW REALITY FRESH FOR THE HATING. AG: Hahahahahahahaha, you don't even know how much I'm laughing at this. CG: BUT SEE, YOU'RE TOO HEAVY ON THE HATE SIDE, OR AT LEAST YOU PRETEND TO BE WHICH IS MAYBE WORSE. AG: You aren't reading anything I say are you? You just want to talk and talk and talk. CG: AND YOU THINK YOU'RE HATING UP EVERYONE HARD WHEN YOU'RE REALLY JUST BURNING OUT THAT ENTIRE EMOTIONAL HEMISPHERE. CG: IT'S LIKE LUKEWARM HATE. PRETENDER'S HATE, WITH NO COUNTERPOINT AT ALL. CG: AS SUCH THERE'S NO REAL SUBSTANCE TO YOUR HATE, IT'S LIKE A CARDBOARD MOVIE PROP. CG: WHICH IS WHY YOUR BRAIN IS BROKEN, KIND OF LIKE TAVROS'S BUT ON THE OPPOSITE HEMISPHERE I GUESS. CG: OR MAYBE YOUR BROKEN BRAIN LED TO THE IMBALANCE IN THE FIRST PLACE, I DON'T KNOW. CG: WHATEVER THE CASE IS, YOU'RE KIND OF EMOTIONALLY SCREWED, SORRY TO SAY. CG: YOUR HATE'S TOO DULL FOR A PROPER KISMESIS, IN MY OPINION. CG: AND I DON'T SEE ANYONE CHOMPING AT THE BIT TO BE YOUR MOIRAIL HONESTLY, UNLESS THERE'S SOMEONE OUT THERE WHO WOULD ACTUALLY BOTHER PITYING YOU. CG: AND LANDING A MATESPRIT? HAHAHAHA! CG: SERIOUSLY, LIKE THAT WOULD EVEN INTEREST YOU. CG: BASICALLY ANY FEATURE OF YOUR EMOTIONAL PROFILE THAT USUALLY MAKES SOMEONE VIABLE IN THE REDROM DEPARTMENT MUST BE TOTALLY FRIED. CG: YOUR BLACKROM POTENTIAL'S PROBABLY TOAST TOO.

Whew.

So now we have ‘kismesis’, ‘moirail’, and ‘matesprit’ as terms for romantic partners, as well as the concepts of black romance, red romance, and ‘moirallegiance’ as the relationship one has with a moirail. Troll romance is not going to get any less confusing for a while.

If Karkat’s grasp of psychology strikes you as amateurish, there’s a reason for that: He gets all his knowledge from romance movies.

AG: Hey asshole, stop watching movies for girls.

I think that’s another strike against the ‘girls are the dangerous ones on Alternia’ argument. Romance movies, per this exchange, are both female-coded and seen as inferior -- Karkat defends his viewing choices by saying they’re INTRIGUING SOCIOLOGICALLY, but Vriska isn’t buying it.

CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 42 WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 33

CHEL: I’m not sure an interest in the workings of romance should be a socially gendered thing in a society where, as it turns out, you have to have an acceptable romantic partner by a certain time or die. You’d think most kids would be trying as hard as they could to learn and put into practice everything they could about it, and you’d also think there’d be better information for them than romcoms.

BRIGHT: Has the mate-or-die part come up yet? I’m not sure when Hussie thought of it.

CHEL: I don’t know if he’d thought of it yet, but it does come up very soon.

BRIGHT: Karkat then moves on to the original reason he contacted Vriska -- he needs her and her mind powers in the game, because he’s just run into a double agent called Jack.

Over on the next panel, Karkat is still talking to Vriska, but he’s glancing back over his shoulder at Jack Noir. His hand is covered in blood, which keeps cycling through a range of colours. The blood, it transpires, is because Jack stabbed him. Karkat is amazingly calm about this.

CG: HE'S COOL, IT'S FINE I DON'T REALLY MIND THE STABBING, IT WAS ALL A MISUNDERSTANDING. CG: WELL OK I'M PRETTY SURE HE MEANT TO STAB ME. CG: BUT I KIND OF THINK THAT'S LIKE CG: THE WAY HE GREETS PEOPLE? AG: This game is so stupid. CG: IN ANY CASE I THINK HE'S PROBABLY ALL STABBED OUT.

This would be ridiculously chill even from someone who isn’t extremely cagey about his blood colour -- and it’s not that Karkat suddenly doesn’t care any more, because as soon as Vriska says she’ll ask Terezi or Jack what colour he’s bleeding, he tells her that he’s out of Terezi’s range, Jack is sworn to secrecy, and Sollux (who’s incommunicado) is the only one who knows how to make Trollian’s viewport feature work. (Given we saw how easy it is to use earlier, I’m surprised Vriska doesn’t try to figure it out herself.)

Over on the next panel, the viewer is now Jack, a few minutes prior to this conversation. Contrary to Karkat’s protestations, Jack stabs him because He's got a pretty sharp tongue and can't seem to keep it sheathed. He is curious when Karkat cares less about the wound and more about Jack seeing his blood colour, which is apparently some freakish mutation. Jack looks at his knife…

CHEL: While it’s not a realistic depiction of the colour, recall that this is the shade of red used in-comic to depict human blood. This reveal probably isn’t a surprise to anyone by now, if you’ve encountered fanart, and honestly it wasn’t a huge mindblowing revelation on my first read before I knew, but I do think it’s a clever little “aha, THAT’S why!” moment. Skilfully done.

It seems he's the only one of his kind with this mutant candy-red blood. An outcast. He thinks he was put on this planet covered in an ocean of his own blood to be taunted. Punished for something. Saddest story you ever heard. Got to do something to shut him up.

BRIGHT: Awww. That’s kind of sweet.

This little interchange gave rise to the ‘Stabdads’ fandom phenomenon, where Spades Slick is envisaged as Karkat’s father-figure. In Homestuck canon, it’s dubious how much affection Slick has for Karkat. He seems more irritated by him than anything else, but that’s about on par for how he treats the rest of the Midnight Crew. On the other hand, it clearly makes a massive impact on Karkat. We’ve seen how important blood colour is on Alternia and how insecure he is about his own; his sudden rush of fellow-feeling towards Jack is understandable, even if it does make him way too forgiving about having been stabbed.

CHEL: Karkat and Jack shake hands, and proceed to be in cahoots. Cahoooooooots. Doodling on the defaced parking ticket from earlier, they draft OPERATION REGISURP.

Your whole team executes the plan along the course of its journey, employing espionage, mind control tactics, political sabotage, vicious interrogations and cold blooded assassinations. Everyone does their part and you begin to learn the true meaning of teamwork, as well as this troll disease called friendship.

Yeah, it actually happening is skipped over with one paragraph, but that’s probably a good thing with all the complexity already going on, and we do hear more details about it. First, we’re reminded of the existence and functions of the Queens’ Rings, the magic rings the queens of Derse and Prospit have which give them traits and powers from whatever the players put in their sprites. The trolls have put their lusii in their sprites, except for Aradia, whose lusus died long ago, so she got in the sprite herself. The Queen could put up with getting bits and pieces from eleven hideous monsters (well, ten hideous monsters and one adowable little fairybull thing oh my gosh it’s cuuuute) tacked onto her, but what she absolutely won’t stand for is the other thing Aradia put in her sprite…

She could not stand bearing the visage of the most loathsome creature known to existence. So vile is its appearance, so contemptible its purpose, all depictions of the creature let alone members of its population are permanently banned from any jurisdiction in the reach of her agents. Those of its kind go by many names, and so does the reviled patron god they herald - THE GREAT DETESTATION, KING PONDSQUATTER, SPEAKER OF THE VAST JOKE, or most commonly, BILIOUS SLICK.

Recall that AR thought of the hieroglyphs in the Frog Temple as “illegal pictography”. We’ll find out later why the Black Queen has such a revulsion for frogs, it’s important. But the important part right now is that she took the ring off. At the time of planning it’s in the ROYAL VAULT.

We briefly see a moment in the future of the Black Queen wrapped in rags, just like the human sessions’ White Queen, wandering the desert as the BANISHED QUASIROYAL, and the caption notes the plan was a success.

However, Doc Scratch appears in the desert in front of her, and it’s noted she was given a new purpose. This, it seems, is the origin of Snowman.

FAILURE ARTIST: I would like if there was some canon Homestuck material expanding on this REGISURP plot.

BRIGHT: Same! It sounds really interesting. One example of Homestuck’s idiosyncratic pacing, I suppose -- we spend pages and pages on trivial alchimeter nonsense, but skip over something more meaty.

CHEL: The Red Team work on that, while the Blue Team battle their own session… or so they think. Yeah, I’m sure you’ve all already figured it out, but the trolls hadn’t just yet. They note that their prototypes are affecting the opposite team’s underlings, and the readers are shown Alternia’s two Frog Temples, one near Aradia’s home and the other near Kanaya’s, each with six pillars outside (one seems to have five, but the sixth is hidden behind the building). Superimposed on each other, the pillars make a full ring of twelve.

The truth was it had always been the same session all along. That your teams were not competing, but cooperating toward a common goal. In the more drawn out form of this adventure's narrative, figuring this out would have been a huge deal. We would have been completely blown away by this stunning revelation. Wow. Same session all along. Really? Huh.

This is what Aradia’s been so mysterious about. She knew. We’re provided with a handy diagram, in case we haven’t been able to keep up.

After watching the phrases MOBIUS DOUBLE and REACH AROUND toggle for a few minutes while in a sort of stupor, you finally snap out of it.

(I just noticed, the Blue Team are the Derse dreamers and the Red Team are the Prospit dreamers. Neat!)

The reader’s attention is drawn instead to the Aquarius and Pisces symbols in the top left, belonging to characters we haven’t met yet, and the narration promises we’ll learn about them soon. Drawing attention again to GA’s Virgo symbol, the narration muses about her.

It will probably be quite some time before you get to be her. It could very well be pages and pages and pages.

Naturally, we jump right back to her.

GA’s intro is long, so we’ll take it piece by piece.

Your name is KANAYA MARYAM.

The Sanskrit name for Virgo is “Kanya”, and it’s also the name of a town in Japan. “Maryam” is the Arabic version of “Mary”, as in Jesus’ mother. It may also be a reference to Marya Zaleska, the title character of the movie “Dracula’s Daughter”.

You are one of the few of your kind who can withstand the BLISTERING ALTERNIAN SUN, and perhaps the only who enjoys the feel of its rays. As such, you are one of the few of your kind who has taken a shining to LANDSCAPING. You have cultivated a lush oasis around your hive, and in particular, you have honed your craft through the art of TOPIARY, sculpting your trees to match the PUFFY ORACLES from your dreams. You have embraced the tool of this trade, which conveniently is the weapon of choice for those who would hunt the HEINOUS BROODS OF THE UNDEAD which crawl from the sand at sunrise to feast on the light and the living.

Couple things established here; trolls are not only nocturnal but actively harmed by their planet’s sun, and undead beings other than ghosts exist. Said traditional weapon for hunting them is a chainsaw, which we can see lying against her bookshelf, a reference to the Evil Dead movies.

It would be convenient if you actually hunted them, but it is of course far too dangerous, every bit as suicidal as attempting to poach the terrible MUSCLEBEASTS who roam at night. So you indulge in your bright fascination with the grim through literature. Just before the sun goes down and you join your flora in rest, you immerse yourself in tales of RAINBOW DRINKERS and SHADOW DROPPERS and FORBIDDEN PASSION.

Rainbow drinkers are, as discussed later on, troll vampires. I don’t think shadow droppers are ever expanded on, but they might be zombies or werebeasts. Troll goths, apparently, are the reverse of human goths, dressing in bright colours and staying up in the daytime, which makes sense for a species who can only safely go out at night.

You are one of the few of your kind with JADE GREEN BLOOD. As such you are one of the few who could be selected and raised by a VIRGIN MOTHER GRUB, an event so rare as to elude documented precedent. She would defend you from desert threats, and though her life would be short, in time you would assure her of progeny.

Recall that the Mother Grub is required for troll reproduction.

You are a SEAMSTRESS or a RAGRIPPER or a TREETRIMMER or a LUMBERJACK, whichever you care to be, and your unique hive is equipped with a great supply of advanced technology to accommodate your interests. The technology and indeed the hive itself were all recovered from the ruins nearby when you were very young. The seed of your hive was deployed on the volcanic rocks beneath the sand with the assistance of your lusus and her remarkable burrowing skills, and you have lived there happily together since. You know the ruins and the hive and everything here that is not sand and rock originated from the world of your dreams. You also know that one day you will visit this world while you are awake. That day is today.

Like Jade, Kanaya has been awake on Prospit for years, and the technology in question is Skaian in origin, so that’s how she knows what’s going on with the game.

Kanaya is prompted to equip her chainsaw, which promptly turns into a lipstick in a Problem Sleuth reference. Like Jade, she has a Wardrobifier, set to randomise, which suddenly turns her black shirt and red skirt into a red leaf-print dress. She takes out the lipstick.

You can choose between your trademark jade or black. Even though a troll's lips are naturally black. But they can always be blacker, and a lady with a true sense of style knows this.

She goes with green, her dress turns into a blue kimono, and she’s messaged by someone with a fuschia Pisces symbol. This person, named cuttlefishCuller, turns out to be rather excitable, greeting her in all caps and following it up with Glub glub glub glub glub!

BRIGHT: This conversation is pretty sweet, with some friendly joking about CC’s quirk (they stick hyphens in front of their capital Es) and mention of their Collapsing And Expanding Bladder Based Aquatic Vascular System. There’s another mention of moirails, with CC saying they’ll have to join the game late to keep an eye on theirs.

It also turns out both CC and Kanaya are having some premonitions of what’s to come! Kanaya is seeing visions in the clouds of Skaia, the same way Jade does, but CC hears whispers from a mysterious ‘she’ who needs her voice keeping down. It’s implied to be CC’s lusus, as both Kanaya and CC are aware their lusii are going to die soon.

Kanaya hopes to be with her lusus as she dies, but looks out of the window to find the Virgin Mother Grub has already passed away, apparently of natural causes.

CHEL: The Mother Grub was seen briefly before; it’s a moth-like creature with a huge fat body the size of a bus, with wings too small to ever lift it, horns the same shape as Kanaya’s, and a skull-like head with big lips. The skull on Terezi’s Doomsday Scale was, we can tell now, a Mother Grub, except quite a lot bigger - presumably a breeding Grub.

BRIGHT: Kanaya changes back into her original outfit, and goes down to live up to her end of the bargain… which entails slicing a hole in her lusus with her chainsaw and pulling out a round object covered in spikes the colour of trolls’ horns, called a Matriorb. Kanaya stores it in her sylladex; she’s using a CHASTITY MODUS, which locks each card away, and the key will serendipitously be discovered when it’s time for the card to be unlocked. These modii are getting more and more esoteric.

Kanaya proceeds to have a conversation with her own moirail, Vriska, which we already read earlier.

You then proceed to have the rest of this conversation we already read, bugging and fussing and meddling through the special and magical union one can only describe as being in moirallegiance with another. At least, you guess that's how you would describe it. Maybe. Troll romance sure is confusing!

Yes, yes it is. (Spoiler: It’s not that confusing once it’s explained.)

Kanaya doesn’t have long to dwell on the conversation, as she’s contacted by caligulasAquarium, someone with a violet Aquarius symbol who she doesn’t seem to think highly of. It rapidly becomes apparent why.

CA: kan make her talk to me do somethin GA: Who CA: your no good connivvin fuckin backstabbin girl crush thats wwho

CHEL: Trolls are supposed to come bi/pan as standard, so why does he need to specify “girl crush”? I wonder if Hussie hadn’t decided that yet when he wrote this part, but I’m not sure.

WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 34

CA’s gender hasn’t been revealed, but let’s not kid ourselves, we know from how he’s talking that he’s a dude. Nice Girls certainly exist but they don’t tend to get portrayed as so whiny in fiction, plus CC comes off as very girly, and that leaves us with six boy and six girl trolls. Balance and opposites and counterparts are a running theme throughout Homestuck. Not that there can’t be nonbinary characters, as some show up in Hiveswap; just that there would most likely have to be an even number of them, split evenly between the groups of players. Fine by me as a nonbinary person with a thing for balance and even numbers of my own.

Also, note that we’ve seen this guy, or at least his hand and foot, before. This is the litter-hater in the bowling shoes.

GA: Overstating Our Relationship Wont Make Me Feel Very Cooperative GA: Its Paler Red Than That Ok CA: pshhhhhh that is a fuckin laugh and you knoww it evveryone does CA: so help me out tell her to talk to me i think she blocked me you got to GA: Why Do I Got To GA: I Dont Got To And Every Time You Take My Help For Granted I Feel Like I Got To A Little Less CA: wwhatEVVER you are so the vvillage twwo wwheel devvice wwhen it comes to auspisticing CA: you cant let a grudge go by you wwont stick your busy stem betwwixt so get wwith the program fussyfangs

BRIGHT: Oh hey, another troll romance term! ‘Auspisticing’ is the last of the lot, don’t worry.

CA: wwho givves a shit wwhy she blocked me or about my fuckin manners come on youvve got a wway wwith her CA: i figure if youre going to auspisticize any twwo brinesuckers wwho sneer at each other a funny wway you might as wwell make it official and be ours right GA: Your Black Solicitation Just Seems Really Indecent

Funny words aside, Hussie does a good job at laying down context for what auspisticism is here; we now know that it involves mediating between two parties who dislike each other and that it’s a form of black romance. Meshing worldbuilding naturally into the dialogue is something Homestuck does really well at times.

Anyway, CA is trying to get in contact with Vriska because he asked her to make something for him and now she’s blowing him off.

GA: What Is It CA: kan stupid wwhat do you think its a fuckin gizmo to bloww up the wworld or somethin CA: ok wwell not that obvviously CA: but somethin thatll kill all land dwwellers wwhat else wwould i be after GA: Can You Just For A Moment Entertain The Thoughts Of One Untouched By Megalomaniacal Derangement And Tell Me Why Id Want To Assist You With That CA: wwell CA: im not goin to vvery wwell kill you am i that wwould be fuckin unconscionable CA: wwhat kind of friend wwould i be

While CA is obviously a douche, there’s something funny about how over-the-top he is about it and how utterly oblivious he is to the idea that Kanaya might have a problem with a device that would kill all landdwellers, although the humour is inversely proportionate to how likely he is to pull it off.

CHEL: Maybe I’m strange, but I think he’s adorable. I get the impression of a small kid trying to puff himself up to adult size.

BRIGHT: There’s also more romance talk, and this next bit is one I find interesting:

CA: you could either play along as our auspistice and do a little mediating like you wwere fuckin hatched to CA: or wwatch she and me devvolvve into fuckin full fledged kismesisses the kind like you dont get once in ten thousand swweeps CA: you knoww thats wwhat it wwould be there wwould be rainboww rivvers runnin through star systems and all nebulizin like liquid firewworks CA: it wwill be beautiful and heartbreaking all at once CA: you should read up on your history instead of poring through that godawwfull sunny rubbish

I’m going to take a step back from Homestuck itself for a moment and talk about kismessitude as it’s portrayed in fandom. People tend to envision it in a variety of ways -- some see it as a BDSM relationship, some as a way of pushing a rival to be better, some as just straight-up hate-sex -- but most depictions show it as something that only affects the two people involved.

Here, though? CA’s talking about kismessitude as something that’s potentially really damn dangerous, to other people besides those involved, and cites history as a backup -- implying it can really be that dangerous, and it’s not just a teenager’s flight of fancy. (Although, that said, CA is clearly using this to try and get Kanaya in a relationship with him, so how sincere he is is questionable.)

CHEL: Later on we do see a little bit of one of the historical cases he might have been citing. We’ll discuss it more then. Also, I do like him saying “sunny” instead of “gloomy”. Makes sense!

Kanaya tells CA none of this matters, and he sneers about the “purity of the bloodline”. That’s an… uncomfortable turn of phrase, especially since he’s speaking to someone not covered by the “purity” standard, but since it applies to aliens and it’s in a society where that’s hammered into its inhabitants it’s not a Problematykks issue. Kanaya tells him it still won’t matter because their race will be wiped out entirely, and his reaction is remarkably understated:

CA: huh CA: wwell ok HURRY UP AND DO NOTHING: 11

CA says he knows Kanaya doesn’t lie except to herself, surprisingly perceptive for one so puffed-up otherwise. CA might be smarter than he’s letting on? He asks if her clouds told her that; that was the reader’s assumption too, but she says no, she has a different source. Uh-oh. We know what the last source of information was, and it cost Vriska an arm and an eye-sevenfold. CA’s own clouds “hide nothin but misfortune and monstrosities”, so we can guess she’s Prospit and he’s Derse. He goes back to nagging her to tell Vriska to talk to him, and when she continues to refuse he poutily steps off.

CA: you dont wwant to be our auspistice cause you dont wwant to get locked into that sort of relation wwith her i can respect that

Kanaya denies this, and CA says everyone knows, including Karkat.

GA: Its Unbelievable GA: Her Patience CA: wwhat CA: wwhoa wwait wwho GA: Never Mind CA: ok wwait did she talk to you today CA: wwhat did she say CA: or glub or wwhatevver

They’re talking about CC, if it wasn’t clear. Kanaya, in a callback to John’s comment to Terezi, facetiously tells him that she talked about Longing To Touch You Indiscretely and That Shes Basically In The Scarlet Throes For You. CA, flustered, picks up that she’s teasing him, and she tells him the truth, that CC’s just concerned as a moirail.

CA: if youre not savvvvy about howw you define yourself to people CA: you can just splash into the moirail zone before you knoww wwhich wways upwward

I’m going to comment on this attitude in a bit more detail when we get a clearer explanation of what moirallegiance actually is. CA leaves her with some arc words.

CA: being a kid and growwing up CA: its hard and nobody understands

Kanaya heads back to her room, planning to emphatically not meddle but help her friends, and consults her source; it’s fortunately not a Doc Scratch-related one at all. It is, in fact, Rose’s long-forgotten GameFAQ, saved on a server floating in the Furthest Ring, to which Prospit’s clouds directed her. I have to show you the panel for a moment though…

I’m sure there was a way we could see the screen without having it facing away from Kanaya who’s supposed to be reading it.

You can only assume this took place a long time ago. This race is likely ancient, preceding yours by millions of sweeps. Maybe billions! You like to try to imagine the adventures of these players. Were they successful in repopulating their race? Did they manage to protect their matriorb and hatch a new mother grub? Could they hold it together, or were they torn apart by the complex social dynamics, the matespritships and moirallegiences and auspisticisms and kismesissitudes that will surely plague your group along the way? You have little doubt they succeeded with flying colors.

Oh dear, dramatic irony. Kanaya fantasises about a troll version of Rose, thinking she must have been the leader of this supposedly long-ago group.

And yet they appear to have been the only of their kind to have risen to the challenge in a session stacked heavily against them.

Huh. So is this just because Kanaya can’t find more information, or are the four kids in fact the only humans who successfully got into the game? Picking four specifically white-coded kids to be the last of the human race due to supposedly their own competence is… not a good choice. And why the hell couldn’t other people succeed? This strikes me as more of the whole theme of “nobody matters except the people we’re focusing on”. A good lampshading of video game tropes, but in a literary story, that’s the opposite message to everything I’ve ever read, and it’s a creepy one.

CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 43 HURRY UP AND DO NOTHING: 12 WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 35

BRIGHT: I thiiiiiiiink it’s at least implied later on that there are other sessions going, it’s just that each session is a closed loop of players so we don’t see the others...although if that’s the case, does that mean Earth’s getting hit with meteors from multiple Skaias?

CHEL: That over with for the moment, we cut to Tavros’ house as you take your place as the PAGE OF BREATH in the LAND OF SAND AND ZEPHYR. Vriska, his server player, gets down to the business of building up his house towards the Gate…

… entirely out of staircases.

AT: i THINK THIS, iS, AT: pROBABLY MEANT TO ANTAGONIZE ME,

Okay, this probably makes me a bad person, but I’m crying with laughter at his expression and that line.

It’s more disability slapstick, but here the point of the joke comes off as being more that Vriska is a jerk and Tavros’ reaction is really understated than any reasonable person being supposed to assume Tavros is wrong for not being able to climb stairs. Emphasis on “comes off as”, unfortunately. I’m still gonna give a Problematykks point, and further experience with Hussie’s attitude to disability has soured the joke somewhat, even in just the next couple of pages.

CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 44

BRIGHT: Vriska tries to get Tavros to crawl up the stairs, first by telling him that he promised not to be boring anymore and then by saying that she’s trying to help him get stronger. She caps off the rant by demanding that he apologise.

AT: oKAY, AT: tHANKS, i GUESS, AT: bUT, AT: sORRY FOR WHAT, AG: For 8eing crippled, you ass! AT: yOU WANT ME TO APOLOGIZE, AT: fOR BEING PARALYZED, AG: Yes. AG: Say you're sorry. AT: i DON'T MEAN TO BE RUDE, oR bORING, AT: bUT THAT'S RIDICULOUS, gIVEN, AT: uH, tHE CIRCUMSTANCES, AG: 8ullshit! AG: It's something called 8asic decency and civility you fudge8looded 8oor. AG: Now get down on your useless wo88ly knees and apologize. AT: nO, i DON'T WANT TO, AG: >::::O

Vriska, what the fuck.

Tavros is really great here. He’s obviously not comfortable fighting with Vriska, and repeatedly tries to redirect her into building him ramps instead of engaging. But, at the same time, he holds his ground and doesn’t let her push him around, and won’t let go of solid hard reality in the face of Vriska trying to emotionally manipulate him.

FAILURE ARTIST: And yet people still call him a wimp.

BRIGHT: Vriska retaliates, because of course she does, by grabbing his wheelchair with her cursor and shaking it about. If Hussie left it at that, everything would be unobjectionable, at least in terms of narrative voice. Instead, well…

Now she's done it. She has awoken the mighty inner fury that is... RUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUFIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

CHEL: It just occurred to me to mention that the name Rufio comes from a character in the movie Hook, the leader of the Lost Boys after Peter Pan left, played by Dante Basco. Tavros’ mental image of him is a reference to that character.

FAILURE ARTIST: Dante Basco did read Homestuck, with hilarious results as we will see.

But unfortunately, Rufio is not real. He's imaginary. A fake. Like a made up friend, the way fairies are. You continue to be sad and alone.

BRIGHT: Eurgh.

Let me be clear: Tavros having no further recourse to deal with Vriska’s abuse beyond his visualised self-esteem is a problem for the character, but it’s not necessarily a narrative problem per se. Escapism is a thing. You could get a decent character arc out of Tavros learning better ways to deal with harassment he can’t escape. It is a narrative problem when the narrator mocks it and makes him out to be pathetic for even trying it.

CHEL: I’d consider this to be just Tavros’ own thought process, but, sadly, this kind of narrative sneering at him carries on throughout Tavros’ presence in the comic and the fandom seems to buy into it. Tavros gets a lot of hate for reasons which mostly boil down to him being a male abuse victim; there’s a feeling that he should “try harder” to fight back, despite him being physically disabled and a member of a caste out of sight beneath her on the social ladder and legally permitted to be killed by her on a whim. Might that count as a point for WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM, for Huss and the fandom not taking the social dynamics into account for why Tavros can’t defend himself?

BRIGHT: I don’t know if it’s fair to count against the fandom when we’re reviewing Homestuck proper, but we can definitely count against Hussie!

WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 36

CHEL: It’s also notable that the common fandom interpretation of Tavros is as Hispanic-coded, at least partly due to his Spanish username, and of Vriska as white-coded. That’s probably not helping.

Since Hussie appears to expect us to agree with Vriska that this is funny, I’m adding another to these as well.

ALL THE LUCK: 2 CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 45 IN HATE WITH MY CREATION: 3

BRIGHT: What’s weird about this whole mess is that Hussie doesn’t — yet — try to say that Tavros should be trying to get stronger; his disability is fully acknowledged. I feel like this kind of mockery is usually accompanied by the attitude that disabled people should just get over their disability, but Hussie’s clear that Tavros can’t. Which means he should do...what, exactly?

CHEL: Not have let Vriska disable him in the first place, presumably. Never mind that, you know, she has mind control powers so he didn’t really have a choice in that either. That is, however, an argument Vriska fans actually make. Apparently some of them actually blame him for not flying when she threw him off the cliff, which… well, unpowered flight is a thing that can happen in the comic but he certainly couldn’t do it then.

BRIGHT: ...Apparently I retain the capacity for surprise at how awful people can be. The fuck?

Back in the comic, Tavros fortunately does have one other means of recourse. Back in her hive, Vriska is suddenly prodded in the back with a flying toilet, courtesy of Kanaya.

GA: Just Presenting A Floating Reminder That Tavros Will Need Plenty Of Inclined Surfaces For His Ascent AG: That's silly. I made so many ramps, you wouldn't even 8elieve it. AG: I specifically decided I wanted to 8uild something ugly and 8oring. It is now the land of ramps and yawns. GA: Hes Reported Otherwise AG: That lousy snitch! May8e I should take his computer away so he can't go crying to fussyfangs anymore. GA: Maybe I Should Upend This Load Gaper Over Your Head AG: No, don't! GA: Im Still Learning The Interface GA: It Could Happen Accidentally At Any Moment AG: I'm only trying to help him. ::::( GA: Think Of Another Way To Help

CHEL: Did I mention Kanaya is my zodiac troll? I can only long to reach her heights of awesome. Of course the ability to levitate toilets would kinda help.

BRIGHT: Vriska heads down to her treasure vault and retrieves a pair of ROCKET SHOES. The captchalogue code for these is ‘PSHOOOES’, which amuses me greatly. Vriska sends the code to Tavros, who combines it with the code for his wheelchair to create a flying wheelchair. Now that is a good use of alchemising!

CHEL: Awww!

Tavros flies up to the Gate, and we cut back to him later on, leading an entourage of communed-with imps and ogres to move obstacles and help him solve puzzles. Using his skills well, I see! In another set of ruins the imps load jigsaw pieces of rock into a frog-shaped alcove,

Things, however, don’t continue to go so well, because Hussie hates this poor kid. I do not mean that facetiously. Statements he’s made elsewhere imply he has a hell of a lot of contempt for several of the characters he created, which I don’t understand at all. We’ll go into this after Act 7, but I get the sensation that the characters are merely tools to show off the complexity and meta references, which are the parts he really cares about.

BRIGHT: It’s not unknown for authors to dislike characters they wrote; the great Terry Pratchett reputedly hated his character Rincewind. The key difference is that in Pratchett’s case, the audience couldn’t tell. Hussie, on the other hand, tends to make his disdain pretty obvious, to the detriment of the story.

CHEL: That’s a point. Conan Doyle grew to hate Sherlock Holmes, too. He didn’t, however, set up situations solely to shit on Holmes in his books.

BRIGHT: I think that’s the key. I’ll forgive a multitude of failings as long as the author seems to be treating the characters fairly. That doesn’t mean that good things have to happen to them — plenty of bad things can happen and I’ll enjoy it — it just means that the author has to...respect how the character feels and would behave, I guess.

Of course, respect is Hussie’s antithesis, so.

Also, nothing so far has shown Vriska to be anything other than a (granted, entertaining) bully. I wasn’t around while Homestuck was updating, so I’m not sure when her fandom took off, but it has to be later than this, surely?

CHEL: I don’t know. I wasn’t around till about mid-Act 6.

What was I on about? Oh yes. Tavros is interrupted by Vriska again, who bitches him out for doing things the boring way and seeking the boring lore.

AG: The minds of your consorts are very soft and impressiona8le. AG: As easily manipul8ed as all those imps you've 8een 8ossing around. AG: I have picked apart their tiny little lizard 8rains and seen through all the smoke and mirrors of their riddles. AG: I have gotten to the truth they are guarding. The great 8ig mystery 8ehind this planet. And you know what it is, Tavros? AT: nO, AG: It's 8ullshit! AG: Meaningless, 8oring, fanciful 8ullshit wrapped in flowery poems to keep you guessing. AG: It all leads to one thing anyway, and that's what we should put our attention on. AG: Real gamers cut to the chase. They power through all the nonsense and go for the gold. AG: They cheat, Tavros. AG: It is time you learned to start cheating.

Interesting theory. Tavros thinks befriending his monsters instead of killing them is cheating, and Vriska grudgingly agrees but is annoyed he isn’t killing anything. She claims to have designed a better and more challenging quest for him; he asks after her own quest, and she says she has time because Kanaya’s busy.

AG: Which is just as well 8ecause I was starting to get nannied HARD. WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 37

Strange word choice for a species raised by animals, but okay. Vriska sends Tavros a map to the next Gate, and he sets off in his little rocket chair. Little does he know.

You proceed through what seems to be your second gate, into the LAND OF MAPS AND TREASURE. The THIEF OF LIGHT lies in wait.

In a callback to our last meeting of Breath and Light players, Tavros crashes through Vriska’s wall and is left hanging upside-down in the rocket chair from the large cobwebs across the room, while Vriska sleeps on a pile of broken eight-balls. Doesn’t look comfortable, but trolls rest in worse places later. Vriska wakes, and Tavros falls head-first onto the floor.

Here is where it gets incredibly uncomfortable, and we have to show it in detail to assign points properly and so that there’s no ambiguity about what’s happening, so if you have any sexual assault, ableism, underage, mind control, or victim-blaming triggers you may want to skip this part. No clothing is removed but it’s very unpleasant to read and the attitude toward it is worse. Seriously, this is Taklamakan Zoo levels of bad.

(This heading below’s not part of the comic, I just put it there so you can skip. The sequence ends with the piece of fanart of Kanaya looking at the sideways screen.)

~*THE ASSAULT STARTS HERE*~

Vriska sits up. She’s wearing a very short strappy white Tinkerbell dress with her sign on it, and what look like over-the-knee socks, a commonly fetishised style of clothing. I remind you these characters are supposed to be thirteen years old. The dress is also the same as the one worn by the fairy in the artwork on Tavros’ desktop background. I don’t know if Vriska had seen that or not.

FAILURE ARTIST:

To be fair she’s just in an actually-more-modest version of what Peter Pan’s sidekick/love interest wears and the socks come off as more dorky than sexy.

Oh my! It appears Pupa Pan himself has flown through your window while you were asleep. How exciting! Surely he is here to take you away on the adventure of a lifetime. He is more dreamy and heroic than you ever imagined. But what's this?? It seems the legendary Boy-Skylark has misplaced his shadow. He is looking EVERYWHERE for it, to no avail. He is having a devil of a time, what with being paralyzed from the waist down and all. He clearly needs your help.

CHEL: Vriska is prompted to Help Pupa find shadow, and approaches Tavros with a nasty-looking grin on her face, while he lies on the floor, gritting his teeth in noticeable pain.

Pupa! You truly are a silly goose. Your shadow has been trapped underneath your useless torso the whole time! Honestly, where else would it be you stupid sack of shit?

Charming. Vriska proceeds to kick him in the head, or at least nudge him with her foot, while he lies unresponsive.

Of course, the secret to reuniting with your shadow is to get up and walk around. And play and dance and frolic! Your shadow will surely join in your gaiety. But it appears Pupa has lost the use of his legs. There will be no frolicking in this young man's future. ::::( Unless...

Everyone knows that just a pinch of SPECIAL STARDUST along with a happy thought will allow any boy to get up and walk again. Everyone knows this because it is in the classic tale, PUPA PAN. Young Pupa flies through the window of a fairy girl's respiteblock, falls on the floor, and has trouble getting up like an enormous pansy. The fairy girl then helps him walk again, and in return, he teaches her to fly, even though she probably already knows how to fly. Because she's a fairy. They fly out of her window together, and have magical adventures for many sweeps thereafter. To be honest, you hardly know a damn thing about Pupa Pan. But you do not care.

Pupa remains as pathetic and useless as ever.

FAILURE ARTIST: The story just keeps mocking Tavros for being disabled.

CHEL: Not to mention for being interested in fairies. Because how dare a boy have a gender-nonstandard interest, or a young teenager enjoy whimsical escapism from an increasingly horrible and guaranteed-to-be-short life.

WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 39

I might be projecting because the fandom has made me loathe her, but it honestly comes off like Vriska dressed up like this in the first place less to seduce Tavros and more to make sure she thoroughly ruined his favourite thing to hurt him further, especially if the narration is supposed to be things she’s actually saying to him.

The stardust did nothing! Probably because it is just glittery powder with no magical properties whatsoever and is basically bullshit. Because in case it wasn't clear, magic isn't real, and neither are miracles. OR It could just be that Pupa has failed to have a happy thought! Your duty is clear. You will have to MAKE him have happy thoughts. Vriska: Make Pupa have happy thoughts.

He certainly doesn’t seem to be having happy thoughts now. Notice his expression, what we can see of it, looks terrified, he’s trembling, and let’s recall that he’s paralysed from the waist down. Even if he wasn’t, she’s of a far, far higher caste than him, legally permitted to do whatever she wants to him, including killing him if he tries to resist. It’s kind of gone back and forth on, but higher bloods are a few times stated to be a lot stronger than lower bloods, and if they work like humans, they’re in puberty right now, a time at which human girls tend to get taller and stronger sooner than boys. Again, it’s gone back and forth on, but a common interpretation is that female trolls are stronger than male trolls in general and/or have the social power advantage. Let’s also remember that, even if none of those factors apply, Vriska has mind control powers. There is no point here at which Tavros has the advantage, nothing he can use as leverage on her. She can do whatever the hell she wants, and she does.

BRIGHT: We’ve also been explicitly shown that Vriska has little to no respect for anyone else’s autonomy if she finds it inconvenient, and that Tavros is her favourite punching bag, and that his ability to stand up for himself when she gets going is extremely limited.

CHEL: Despite the odds stacked against him, Tavros struggles against the kiss forced on him, and when Vriska pushes him back, doesn’t respond with anything but a look of horror, though she appears to expect him to, as a flickering heart-spade with a question mark over it appears between them. I’m not sure whether that’s supposed to be the thought process of him or her or both.

Vriska hurls him onto the floor with some force...

… and activates her mind control, causing little hearts to light up in Tavros’ eyes.

BRIGHT: Vriska has used her mind-control powers on Tavros before, and when it happened she walked him off a cliff. There is basically no way that her doing it again isn’t going to be a traumatic experience for him, above and beyond the inherent horror of losing control over one’s body.

I’m inclined to think that forcibly altering his emotions is worse, though. Being paralysed was bad enough, but Tavros knows what happened and he knows how he feels about it. Making him fall in love with her is just…on one level, it’s a horrible assault on his autonomy as a person, and on another level, it’s tailor-made to make him doubt himself and believe the encounter was something he wanted.

FAILURE ARTIST: I hadn’t thought that he might now consider the encounter as consensual, which would explain his later reaction.

CHEL: Tavros paws at her legs, making kissy faces, and she looks vaguely concerned. Note the background still depicts wavy blue rays coming off her, showing her power is still active.

Looking defeated, she drops the control and dumps him on the floor again.

I’m not sure what she’s supposed to be thinking in this last panel. Is she feeling guilty? Is she disappointed that he didn’t like her under his own power? Has she just decided he’s too useless to be worth the effort? Any could be true.

BRIGHT: I read that as disappointment that even when he ‘liked’ her, he didn’t act the way she wanted. (And the way Tavros acted is kind of disturbing. ‘Mindlessly pawing at someone’ is not what I’d expect from him if he was legitimately attracted to someone.)

FAILURE ARTIST: The common interpretation these days was she was realizing she wasn’t into boys which okay that’s good for her but she should feel more bad about molesting him.

CHEL: That also makes no sense, because she shows interest in multiple boys later.

I’m also not entirely sure if Vriska had the intention of actually raping Tavros here (in the standard way, I mean, as one could argue that mind control is a form of rape), or just making out with him. The fact that she dressed up in vaguely fetishy clothing isn’t making it look good, though. Yes, she’s very young, but traumatised kids in particular have been known to lash out sexually like that. It’s a way of reasserting personal power, and I imagine it would be more prevalent in a society with no sapient adult supervision. While there are mitigating circumstances involved in their social situation and Vriska not really having ever had a chance to learn better, that doesn’t make this not a horrible thing to do, or not traumatising for Tavros.

BRIGHT: The clothing could potentially be down to Vriska wanting to look ‘adult’ without fully understanding why it looks adult. That does come up sometimes with teens — they want to experiment with clothing because that’s how adults dress, not because they want to look sexy, or they might dress a certain way for dates because that’s the social model they have for How Dates Work.

And if I read it like that, this basically looks like Vriska having the date equivalent of a dolls’ tea party. Which says volumes about how she views Tavros’s autonomy.

CHEL: Good point. Though honestly it would say volumes about same either way!

BRIGHT: I said earlier that Vriska is better than Equius at recognising when other people’s desires conflict with hers, and she is, but that doesn’t mean she respects those differences. She just recognises that they’re there, and overrides them. This is a prime example of Vriska viewing Tavros as something between a chew-toy and a prop. First she kicks him around and terrifies him, then she expects him to be able to get over those emotions at the drop of a hat and respond to her advances — and, moreover, she wants him to respond in a certain way, which Tavros has zero way of knowing. This is the first time she’s shown that sort of interest in him, unless her earlier behaviour was the Alternian equivalent of pigtail-pulling.

...I think maybe that was in fact Alternian pigtail-pulling. Or at least Vriska’s version of pigtail-pulling.

CHEL: That’ll actually make more sense, once we explain what the spade symbol means.

Okay, how many counts does this cover?

ALL THE LUCK: 12 ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 31 CALL CPA PLEASE: 26 CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 55 IN HATE WITH MY CREATION: 13

It also occurred to me during this sequence to think again about how Karkat contemptuously swears at and hangs up the phone on the injured Tavros. This, at first glance, seems to be very much at odds with the “cranky but caring” impression we’re supposed to have of Karkat… but it fits precisely with Hussie’s opinion of Tavros and how pathetic he is for allowing a much more powerful person to permanently disable him. I know at the moment it looks like I’m not separating the character from the author, but it’ll become clear as we go that that is what he thinks.

IN HATE WITH MY CREATION: 14

Why didn’t we start a FUCK YOU, HUSSIE count?

BRIGHT: It would have ended up longer than all the other counts combined.

CHEL: The actual assault is over now, but there’s one more picture of it. The ramifications must continue to be discussed, so tread cautiously. The actual act is over now, though.

Said ramifications come pretty quickly. Kanaya, having dealt with getting herself into the game and prototyped her own lususprite, decides to check on Vriska.

Ideally she has not gotten herself into too much trouble. And ideally the dramatic irony has not gotten so thick you could draw a dotted line on it with a tube of lipstick and cut it in half with a chainsaw.

Of course, she sees the exact moment Vriska kisses Tavros.

(Fanart source has now been deleted, sadly.)

~*THE ASSAULT ENDS HERE*~

Humorous art aside over, let’s watch Kanaya’s reaction in more detail. She angrily looks at a copy of the Tinkerbell dress, which she presumably sent the alchemiter code for rather than the actual item to Vriska, hence why she still has it.

So THAT'S why she had you make this dress for her??? And you just went along with it like a sucker. Argh, you are such an IDIOT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Like Karkat, Kanaya is presented as the caring one, the protective one. The “mom friend” of the group. And yet, she looks at this, in which Tavros is clearly frightened and struggling, and her reaction is to be mad that Vriska didn’t want to wear the dress for a date with her. I’m not sure whether this says more about Hussie’s opinion of Tavros or the social system of Alternia or both, but it certainly says a lot.

CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 56 HURRY UP AND DO NOTHING: 13 IN HATE WITH MY CREATION: 15

BRIGHT: Kanaya has had to corral Vriska on Tavros’s behalf already! Possibly more than once! She has all the information to realise that this is abusive, even leaving aside Tavros’s reaction! Sure, teens can be self-centred, but even so this is egregious.

CHEL: Kanaya’s Grubsprite comforts her and she throws the dress out the window.

Being a kid and growing up. It's hard and nobody understands.

Yes, I’m sure Tavros thinks so too.

Charles: "I know Sir can be prickly, but you have to understand he had a very terrible childhood."

Klaus: "I understand. I'm having a very terrible childhood right now."

-A Series of Unfortunate Events

[rm-renfield]

I decided to start reading Homestuck.

(I started it like 3 times before but the beginning was too slow for my short attention span)

Reading because of

friend recommendations

and because Alicia wants to do a cosplay.

She said I am like Tavros.  I hope that is good.

[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

[homespork-review]

HOMESPORK ACT 5 ACT 1: Mobius Double Plusungood, Part 2

BRIGHT: Nepeta wants to know what’s going on. Aradia finally stops dodging the question and tells Nepeta she’s dead, but doesn’t elaborate on how it happened. She asks Nepeta to keep it a secret, which Nepeta agrees to. Aradia’s also picked up some froglike traits from being merged with the sprite -- namely a tendency to ribbit.

In retrospect, it’s kind of funny that an active player can merge with a sprite. The role of a sprite seems to involve having detailed knowledge of how the Game works and what the player should do next, but only dispensing vague advice to the player. Prototyping a player would give them full access to that knowledge with no sprite vagueness to get in the way. The Game doesn’t seem too concerned about that, though.

CHEL: Now it’s time to get to know AG better. A doodle of her declaring her to be a HUGE BITCH fades into her standing in her room. Rather gothic, and also filthy-looking; it’s dark, with a red sky outside, and cobwebs and broken Magic 8 Balls lie around everywhere. There’s a FLARP poster and numerous pages of notes on the wall.

Your name is VRISKA SERKET.

You are a master of EXTREME ROLE PLAYING. You can't get enough of it, or really any game of high stakes and chance. You have persisted with the habit even in spite of your ACCIDENT. But then again, you don't have much choice.

Your lusus is VERY HUNGRY, ALL THE TIME. She can only be appeased by the FLESH OF YOUNG TROLLS. You cloud campaigns for teams of Flarpers, utilizing your abilities for ORCHESTRATING THE DEMISE OF THE IMPRESSSSSSSSIONA8LE. Your victories supply you with treasure, experience points, and SPIDER FOOD.

You are something of an APOCALYPSE BUFF, which is something you can be on Alternia. You are fascinated by end of the world scenarios, and enjoy constructing DOOMSDAY DEVICES for the hell of it. You are drawn to means of DARK PROGNOSTICATION and the advantages they offer, particularly in gaming scenarios. Your abilities in this department were hobbled with the loss of your VISION EIGHTFOLD, and you have since sought alternatives through various BLACK ORACLES. You consult with these ominous globes, but routinely destroy them in frustration over the PUZZLING GUARANTEED INACCURACY of their predictions. Breaking them has developed into a habit BORDERING ON FETISHISTIC, and with each you destroy, you add to an insurmountable stockpile of TERRIBLE LUCK. You have to stop. But addiction is a powerful thing.

FAILURE ARTIST: FINALLY we get a name for her and we don’t have to keep saying AG. I imagine the non-Homestucks are feeling like I did when I played Danganronpa 2 finally and saw the “fingers-in-his-ass” guy.

CHEL: She examines a drawing on the wall, of her FLARP character MARQUISE SPINNERET MINDFANG, who is just Vriska in a different coat and seaboots, with a hook instead of her robot hand. She is the scourge of land dwellers and sea dwellers alike, and worst nightmare to silly BOY-SKYLARKS everywhere. She has accumulated more treasure and gained more levels than any member of the PETTICOAT SEAGRIFT class ever. She gained all the levels. All of them.

En route to her computer, Vriska steps on a D4, and complains about how she’s had terrible luck since her mysterious accident. I’d just like it noted that this is a small but noticeable occurrence of Vriska’s tendency to blame others for her problems; if she cleaned her room some time, that wouldn’t happen. Still, she doesn’t worry about it too long, as she’s busy.

So many irons in the fire. Such a tangled web. It is a web full of flaming irons and mixed metaphors.

BRIGHT: Vriska equips her weapon of choice, a set of enchanted D8 dice called the FLUORITE OCTET.

...okay, I’m getting used to characters having semi-absurd weapons, but seriously, what? Let’s review everyone else’s chosen weapons: Hammer, knitting needles, sword, gun, sickles, lance, clawed gloves, walking cane. Sollux had some throwing stars but didn’t assign them to his specibus owing to his telekinesis being enough; we haven’t seen Aradia’s strifekind yet, but she also has telekinetic abilities, and hers are apparently enhanced by her being dead. So that’s a lot of genuine weapons, and some things which aren’t weapons but can readily be used that way in a pinch...and then Vriska has a set of enchanted dice.

It’s a good fit both for Homestuck’s absurdity and for Vriska’s obsession with luck. But it does stand out rather.

Anyway, rolling the dice will execute a wide range of highly unpredictable attacks. Very high rolls can be devastating to even the most powerful opponents. Apparently these work everywhere, not just in FLARP games. Also, while we see ghosts, psychic powers, and superpowered coding, I think this is the only reference to plain magic we have on Alternia.

Vriska steps away from the computer to avoid talking to GA, who she refers to as an unwelcome solicitor, but returns to it when someone else starts messaging her. Vriska calls him this guy; he has no icon -- and, oddly, no username -- and types in white, which means the reader (and Vriska) ends up highlighting the conversation a lot. 

Hello.

AG: Oh my god, why are you talking to me????????

This is the last time we'll ever talk.

AG: Still sticking with the white text I see. So smooth and stylish!

AG: I forgot how much I loved highlighting it to read all the 8oring things you have to say.

AG: It's like a fun game for super extra handicapped retarded people. Like opening a present! Find out what o8noxious thing the mystery tool typed.

AG: What is it!

A parting courtesy, I suppose.

All the ways I've exploited you were meant to bring about the events that will take place this evening.

Knowing this will provide context for the events in your near future, and will affect how you behave in response.

These events will be just as important as those preceding it.

I've gone to great lengths, you see. 

Well, this guy sounds ominous.

Also, using ‘handicapped’ and ‘retarded’ as insults is entirely in character for Vriska, who has no time for people who can’t operate on her level. Currently Vriska’s also being shown as an unlikeable character. We’ll see how that develops.

CHEL: Still, a lot of people really don’t like those words being used casually, and the fact that we need to show you how things develop should imply that they won’t develop in a way you’ll like. So…

CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 39

White Text Guy, as the characters refer to him for a while to come yet, continues gloating about how successfully he’s exploited Vriska, who tells him she’ll log off and orders him not to use that nasty trick where you log me 8ack on out of petty douchey spite! WTG says he’ll be brief, though he’s not particularly brief in fact, tells her he no longer hold[s] her accountable for any wrongdoing, and says that if she accepts this, she may get her luck back. Vriska doesn’t believe him and continues to rant, and he points out that her unpleasant, simplistic temperament is what made her so easy to mess with.

If you turn a swarm of wasps on a crowd, the outcome is certain.

He leaves with these even more ominous words:

Though the magnitude of the ensuing destruction resulting directly from your actions will be neither possible or necessary for you to fathom, there nevertheless ought to be a silver lining.

The only question is whether you will live long enough to see it.

Vriska, enraged, lifts a Magic 8 Ball with the intention to smash it, but decides she can’t be bothered, and answers GA, hoping some camaraderie will cheer her up, even if it’s from a meddler. However, GA’s first question is “Is Your Lusus Dead Yet”. Not particularly cheering, is it?

Vriska, for the first time, expresses concern and sympathy for another person when GA says her own lusus is dead, though it may be undermined slightly by her own personal disappointment in never having got to meet said lusus. GA doesn’t seem very concerned, and says “Maybe You Still Can”. According to her, though, all their lusii are dying, as a “Preemptive Consequence” (if that’s a meaningful concept) of the upcoming Game. Karkat blames himself for activating the cursed code, but GA thinks it was inevitable. However, Karkat’s idea of a curse Is Inseparable From His Perception Of Events As Intrinsically Negative And As Tailored To His Personal Dissatisfaction, and so is Vriska’s poor luck. GA points out that if Vriska cleaned her floor she wouldn’t step on so many things. THANK YOU, GA, you made my point for me! Vriska is angry at GA “meddling” so, and demands to know why she does.

GA: Because Youre Dangerous

[...]

GA: Its Ok To Be Dangerous

GA: Lots Of People Are

GA: And Dangerous People Can Be Really Important

GA: Maybe Even The Most Important Sometimes

GA: But It Just Means Theres Got To Be Someone Around To Keep An Eye On Them

As Vriska gets angrier, it’s noted that she puts 8s in her typing in places where they don’t work as Bs or as “eight” sounds, and they become more numerous.

AG: Or you know, if you're so h8gh 8nd might8 an8 th8nk you're so gr8at, m8y88 you c8uld oh I d8n't kn8w........

AG: TRY AND ST8P ME FROM DO8NG B8D THINGS????????

GA: That Wouldnt Work

GA: If I Tried To Stop You You Would Regard Me As An Enemy

GA: Instead Of Merely As A Nuisance

BRIGHT: GA’s strategy appears to be trying to talk Vriska into being a better person, either by persuading her that it’s the right thing to do or by being so annoying that Vriska does the right thing to avoid being meddled with. She’s making an effort, I’ll give her that. And given that she doesn’t live anywhere near Vriska, there isn’t all that much she can do to rein her in.

CHEL: Vriska signs off, ranting about her “Lousy st8pid godd8mn supportive friend!” and heads down the enormous staircase to check on her lusus.

You wonder if any other kid on the planet has such a high maintenance lusus? You DOUBT it.

As a matter of fact, one does and Vriska knows that, but we’ll see them later. Not a continuity error, it’s just Vriska self-pitying.

From a window, we see a doomsday device hanging over a chasm by chains attached to the surrounding cliffs. Vriska built it for an especially powerful and influential member of the nautical aristocracy, with help from an as-yet-unnamed nearby friend. Vriska reaches the bottom of the stairwell, and we meet her lusus, which is…

… a spider about the size of a cathedral. For the sake of our arachnophobic readers, we’ll refrain from posting a picture. Suffice it to say she’s as terrifying as she sounds. Pan out to show the entire valley is filled with cobwebs, and Vriska’s hive is matched by a similar one on the other side of the valley.

Before we move on, I’d just like to chat a little about the astrological symbolisms used here. Vriska’s the Scorpio troll, and it puzzles a lot of people that she’s spider-themed instead of scorpion-themed. Both arachnids, but not the same thing. However, Scorpio does have multiple symbols, depending on the source of the interpretation of the constellation, including the spider and the phoenix. Observe! (I enjoy astrology. Sue me.) Also, a scorpion would be a lot harder to get the story symbolism out of; Vriska is at least attempting to be a master manipulator pulling on strings, i.e. webs. The astrological symbolism and alleged personality traits aren’t used for all of the trolls in general, either. The troll with the sign of Aquarius the Water-Bearer is seadwelling nobility and probably wouldn’t be happy to be represented astrologically by a servant, and Gamzee is basically the opposite of the ambitious and hardworking traits of the allegedly typical Capricorn. Basically the signs are mostly aesthetic and if Huss can work in some connected symbolism that’s a bonus. I don’t consider this a negative thing in particular, though it might annoy some astrology buffs.

Actually, I don’t know how intentional this was, but one fan actually analysed how the social expectations on Alternia are in fact the exact opposite of what would actually suit their astrological sign. It didn’t get finished but there’s some interesting information - read the posts in question here, beware spoilers!

BRIGHT: One amusing consequence of this can be turned into a game: Go to Tumblr, find an astrology post, and see how long it takes to figure out if it’s a Homestuck riff. Some of them even just say ‘Vriska’ for Scorpio.

It’s probably just because I mostly follow fandom-related blogs, but I’ve yet to see a Tumblr astrology post that wasn’t a more-or-less-subtle Homestuck joke.

CHEL: And the ones which aren’t make for great fanfic prompts!

BRIGHT: Vriska’s lusus is fine, as it happens. Vriska pretends to be happy about this, but she’s rather less convincing than Dave is about his own guardianship issues. 

FAILURE ARTIST: And we turn from Vriska to look in her neighbor and it’s….that creepy guy! Hurray!

Your name is EQUIUS ZAHHAK.

You love being STRONG.

You are so strong, you would surely be the class of the elite legion of RUFFIANNIHILATORS. And while such a calling would be quite honorable, you would prefer to join the ranks of the ARCHERADICATORS, perhaps the most noble echelon the imperial forces have to offer. Unfortunately, you SUCK AT ARCHERY. You have not successfully fired a SINGLE ARROW. Every time you try, you BREAK THE BOW. You are simply too strong. You have broken so many bows, it has developed into a habit BORDERING ON FETISHISTIC. You have to stop. But addiction is a powerful thing.

You have a great appreciation for THE FINE ARTS. You use your aristocratic connections to acquire PRICELESS MASTERPIECES, painted in the oldest and most respected Alternian tradition of NUDE MUSCLEBEAST PORTRAITS. These striking depictions of the EXQUISITE FAUNA native to Alternia remind you of the PUREST PHYSICAL IDEAL that must be sought by anyone who professes a LOVE OF STRENGTH. When those of lesser bloodlines turn up their uncultured noses at such stunning material, it MAKES YOU FURIOUS.

Practically everything MAKES YOU FURIOUS. You have so much rage, it can only be expressed through STAGGERING QUANTITIES OF PHYSICAL VIOLENCE. You build strong and sturdy robots, set them to kill mode, and BEAT THE SHIT OUT OF THEM in caged brawls. Sometimes you LOSE TEETH. But they usually grow back.

FAILURE ARTIST: Equius Zahhak’s first name is obviously a take on the Latin word for horses, but his last name is from a Persian demon who is also known as “he who has 10,000 horses”. 

So yes, that furry porn on his walls is high art to trolls. Though the prequel Hiveswap Friendsim, which has artist characters, doesn’t have MUSCLEBEAST PORTRAITS. Maybe Equius is actually weird.

CHEL: Actually, the Friendsim does have musclebeast art; if you squint at the beginning of Nikhee’s route, you can see depictions of white muscular chests flanking the arena, which don’t look like troll chests. Hiveswap proper is rated PG, so we’ll be spared it there, too.

FAILURE ARTIST: Equius is more even-tempered than his introduction suggests. He’s not completely violence-free (as we will see)  but he’s not in a constant ‘roid-rage. Heck, from what we’ve seen before of him he just gets peeved and snotty. 

Equius calls for his lusus Aurthour, who I guess could be called another self-insert. Aurthour is a centaur-type creature with cow udders and a mustache and looks like something out of Hussie’s early comics. Aurthour carries a glass of lusus milk on a platter, presumably from its own udders. Ummm. 

You cannot hope to beat Aurthour in a butler-off. He is simply the best there is.

Sweet, I guess.

CHEL: I wonder how Aurthour contorts around to reach his udder. Centaurs aren’t really known for flexibility.

FAILURE ARTIST: We find out why Aurthour has a shiner. It’s not because of domestic abuse but because when Equius “gently” pats Aurthour, Aurthour bruises. Yet this creature is the only lusus STRONG enough to raise Equius. 

Equius tries to drink the glass, but it shatters in his hand. Which begs the question of why Aurthour doesn’t use an alternative to glass. Well, I guess Equius going straight to the source would be too disturbing even for Hussie. A bigger problem is how Equius can do the fine detail work of building robots when he can’t hold a glass. 

Equius goes into a rage, which just means he stands around in Hero Mode while the lusus milk quickly evaporates. Wait, quickly evaporates? What is it made of?

CHEL: I assumed the heat of his rage boiled it.

FAILURE ARTIST: Equius tries to equiup equip a bow but fails due to his strength. Like the glass smashing, this is a normal occurrence. You’d think he’d give up but apparently breaking bows is like popping bubble wrap to him. Expensive bubble wrap. So he has the useless 1/2bowkind, a bowkind for when he’s ever that lucky, and the fistkind which he actually utilizes. Yes, in Homestuck, you can register your fists as lethal weapons. 

Equius talks with Nepeta and the narration summarizes like thus:

CT: D --> Yes AC: :33 < no CT: D --> Yes AC: :33 < no CT: D --> Yes AC: :33 < no CT: D --> Yes AC: :33 < no CT: D --> Yes AC: :33 < no CT: D --> Yes AC: :33 < no CT: D --> Yes AC: :33 < no

Equius is still worried about his good friend Nepeta, so he decides to relieve his stress by talking with another friend. And here comes a line fans take as meaning trolls don’t have friendship. 

It should be noted that in troll language, the word for friend is exactly the same as the word for enemy.

Though that line contradicts Equius considering Nepeta his friend only a few lines back. This worldbuilding sucks. 

CHEL: Well, he doesn’t treat her the way a human should treat a friend at this point.

FAILURE ARTIST: So Equius trolls this frienemy who turns out to be Gamzee.

centaursTesticle [CT] began trolling terminallyCapricious [TC]

CT: D --> Have I ever told you what a reprehensible disgrace you are

TC: hAhA, fUcK yEaH, oNlY eVeRy MoThErFuCkIn DaY bRo!  

Yeah, Equius, pretty much everyone tells Gamzee that every day. 

Equius says he wants get some things off his chest, which giving what we later learn about troll relationships might be adulterous. Gamzee tells him not to let his feelings be bottled up lIkE a FuCkIn AlL sHaKeD uP bOtTlE oF fAyGo and this metaphor makes Gamzee thristy. Equius berates Gamzee for drinking soda, which seems harsh but we later find out soda is booze for trolls. He’s also angry at Gamzee for doing sopor slime. Now, fans think Karkat didn’t like Gamzee doing sopor slime but we never actually see it. It’s just Equius who cares. This leads to an exchange I find interesting.

CT: D --> You will stop

TC: WhOaAaA, i WiLl?

TC: hOw Do YoU kNoW tHaT?

CT: D --> No, you don't understand

CT: D --> It's not a predi%ion, it's an order

CT: D --> I command you to stop

Gamzee is so passive he finds it hard to imagine making decisions that will change his future. Sad. And when Gamzee does get what Equius means:

TC: Oh, AlRiGhT bRoThEr.

TC: yOu MoThErFuCkIn GoT iT.

CT: D --> What

CT: D --> Are you serious

TC: yEaH.

TC: I mEaN, yOu GoT tO sHoW sOmE fAiTh In YoUr FrIeNdS, cAuSe ThEy'Re AlL tHe OnEs WhO'rE bEiNg To LoOk OuT fOr YoU.

TC: sO fUcK iF yOu SaY i'M nOt DoInG tHe ShIt RiGhT, tHeN wHaT tHe MoThErFuCk Do I kNoW!

CT: D --> No

CT: D --> This is una%eptable

CT: D --> Ok, let's start over

CT: D --> I apologize

CT: D --> I was completely out of of line, and I'm sorry

CT: D --> I have no right to talk to you like that, or tell you what you can't do

TC: aWw, No WoRrIeS!

Gamzee was ready to kick sopor slime except Equius backed down. Wondering about the timeline where Equius didn’t back down. 

Still, Equius begs Gamzee to behave like a superior. Gamzee asks what that means and Equius gives a very creepy answer.

CT: D --> 100k, it isn't that difficult

CT: D --> Try to be cognizant of your desires and needs

CT: D --> And attempt to regard those around you as simple vehicles meant to bring about your gratification

At least Equius is a hypocrite...most of the time.

Equius asks what Gamzee is doing and Gamzee relates his adventures in Sgrub. He bonked an imp on the head and scared another with a horn and eventually ended up sharing pie with them. Equius likes the tales of valor but is disappointed with the peaceful end. 

Equius asks Gamzee to roleplay and Gamzee says yes; there’s an uncomfortable sequence where Equius tries to get Gamzee to virtually dom him. Gamzee is terrible at being assertive, but Equius is still whipped into a state of contrition. Basically, Equius is getting off on this. 

CHEL: It should be noted that tricking a child into sexual behaviour is a form of abuse even when it’s done by a child of the same age. Not cool, Eq, and not funny, Hussie.

CALL CPA PLEASE: 11

CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 40

SEND THEM TO THE SLAMMER: 4

Though, while that is clearly the reading we’re meant to get from that, I have to say Equius never reads to me like he’s actually enjoying being ordered around. With Gamzee he’s just frustrated that he’s not behaving in a correct manner, and in later exchanges he seems knocked off-balance by the normal social order being upended. I know I’m just projecting, but it reads more like he has some issues with anxiety or OCD and is desperate for someone else to take control and tell him what they want him to do so he doesn’t have to worry. He sweats constantly during these exchanges, which is supposed to imply he’s aroused, but people sweat when they’re worried or afraid too.

FAILURE ARTIST: On a lighter front, Equius says he doesn’t live near the ocean, which considering his neighbor regularly goes on a pirate ship is an odd thing to say.

CHEL: How near is “near”? He might just mean not within walking distance so he can’t casually wander out to the sea like Gamzee does.

FAILURE ARTIST: Equius ends by wondering about the social order that puts someone like Gamzee above him but someone as graceful and poised as a certain mysterious she is of the lowest caste. Gamzee (and the readers) ask who she is and Equius brusquely says D -->I shouldn’t be talking about this D → You’re the enemy before signing off. 

CHEL: If one’s been paying attention, one can guess.

Next, Equius and Vriska are in cahoots. Cahoooooooots. Vriska declares her intention to meddle, and they have a brief exchange about sarcasm. It’s horribly inconsistent whether trolls have sarcasm or not, as I’ve pointed out before. Already gave a point for it, though.

Anyway, Vriska asks if Aradia’s present is finished. It is.

CT: D --> But I don't understand why you're intent on gratifying that worthless peasant

AG: 8ecause I promised I would and it's none of your damn 8usiness! Man.

Their plan is to let Aradia usurp Sollux as leader with her cute little ploy (recall her sending him to sleep and letting him swallow mind honey earlier), then both snatch power from her and become joint leaders. Each asks the other if they’re planning something sneaky and each insists they’re not. Equius can sense that Vriska is trying to read his mind, and when she won’t stop, he takes control of her cybernetic arm, which he built, and makes her slap herself in the face.

FAILURE ARTIST: So given that Vriska tried to read Equius’ mind, despite the dangers (both physically and mentally), it is unbelievable she refrained from reading Karkat’s due to delicacy. 

I think Hussie has said in his commentary that Vriska had a crush on Equius. The fandom prefers lesbian Vriska at this point and so has ignored that. YMMV on if there is evidence of a crush in the text but I find the idea amusing. 

CHEL: Equius goes to fetch the present for Aradia which he was supposed to give to Vriska.

You naturally will doublecross your accomplice, just as you assume she has plans to doublecross you. You assume she is assuming the same of you. Business as usual for blue bloods.

How the hell does this society get anything done?

You will deliver it to Aradia yourself to gain her favor, and then doublecross her and take your rightful position as team leader. How ironic that someone of your blood purity must work to win the favor of the lowest sort of peasant. Humiliating. Strangely titillating, even. But in the end, class order will be restored.

He takes the tarp off the present, and it is…

Why, Aradia. It appears the red glass of your eye has caught the pink and green glint of the moons in their perigees. The sweet poetry almost makes a man forget how the grime that once filled your veins made his stomach turn. It is a good omen for illicit lovers. Could you imagine the scandal if anyone found out?? No one must ever know.

But worry not. Your heart will pump no more of that despicable red sludge. You have been given a new heart. You can be taught the ways of the class you were always meant for. No one is beyond redemption.

Be grateful, dear Aradia. For the first time in your meaningless life you have met a man with true compassion.

Jesus fucking Christ. See what I meant when I said his interactions with girls were worse than his posters? No points because it’s supposed to be creepy, and with the teachings of his society it’s not entirely his fault, but wow.

FAILURE ARTIST: Well, his interaction with a girl is creepy. His relationship with Nepeta is more problematic than fans remember but that’s two-sided and not infatuation. As for Vriska, he’s cold and business-like with her. He collaborates with GA but that’s off-screen and was probably also business-like. Meanwhile, he has lustful interactions with most every male character. We’ve seen how he acts with Gamzee and we’ll see more later. Equius’ interactions with guys are another example of Hussie using male attraction to other males as a punchline.

CHEL: But yes, he’s built her a robot body. Unfortunately for everyone involved, while making out with it, he feels judged by one of his battlebots, gets angry, and punches it. It goes flying out the window and robosplodes above the valley, and its remains hit Vriska’s doomsday device, setting it off. It breaks before it can actually destroy the planet, but the chains holding it up snap, sending it swinging into the cliffside, causing another explosion. The cliff collapses, taking part of Equius’ hive with it, sending Aurthour plummeting into the chasm and crushing Vriska’s spider lusus under tons of rubble.

Cutting back to before that, we see Terezi battling imps on her treehouse’s rooftop, when Vriska messages her, declaring that playing the game together means breaking their truce. Terezi says that’s not what the truce was about; it was about STOPP1NG TH3 3NDL3SS CYCL3 OF R3V3NG3 and Vriska not using her powers maliciously anymore. Terezi’s next couple of comments are just calling Vriska a liar so I’ll just take Vriska’s, to further illustrate her behaviour.

AG: Man, you like to give me such a hard time a8out all that. I can't catch a 8reak! AG: Can't you see I'm trying to put all that 8ehind me and make amends with every8ody? AG: No, of course you can't see that. What am I saying! [...] AG: I'll prove it to you. I'm giving Aradia a present that will make her feel all 8etter finally. AG: Then I'll 8e in the clear. Phew! Totally redeemed. You'll see. I mean smell.

Vriska appears under the impression that large flashy gestures are the important part of an apology, not actual sincerity. Terezi points out Aradia doesn’t care about anything anymore and probably won’t care about this.

AG: Man, why can't you cut me some slack for once???????? AG: It's not like I even did anything that 8ad to you. AG: I lost seven eyes 8ut you only lost two! I would say you came out ahead in the 8argain. GC: 1 KNOW GC: 4ND 4CTU4LLY GC: 1 N3V3R R34LLY GOT TH3 CH4NC3 TO TH4NK YOU >:D

Vriska’s disbelief aside, Terezi really is serious here. Not surprising to the reader, her blindness is basically a superpower.

AG: Remem8er Team Scourge? How convenient all that must 8e to have forgotten! You were so nasty. AG: Oh man, if you crossed Terezi Pyrope you were fucked!!!!!!!! GC: Y34H 1F YOU W3R3 4 B4D GUY GC: W3 W3R3 SUPPOS3D TO B3 L1K3 4 V1G1L4NT3 DUO D1SP3NS1NG JUST1C3 GC: 4ND YOU COULD T4K3 TH3 B4D GUYS HOM3 4ND F33D TH3M TO YOUR STUP1D SP1D3R GC: BUT 1NST34D YOU JUST F3D H3R 3V3RYBODY! GC: 4ND L13D 4ND L13D 4ND L13D

Okay, this little exchange needs some more dissection. Terezi is supposed to be the “good cop” of Team Scourge, the by-the-book one on the side of the law. But we saw what Alternian law is like, and later on we’ll see demonstrations that things such as having a birth defect or, according to Hiveswap, owning fiction which so much as mentions the possibility of rebellion, are punishable by death. Not only is this not making Terezi look any better, if she’s as obsessed with the law as we saw, who would she deem not a “bad guy”, and why would Vriska have such a shortage of “bad guys” that she’d need to take anyone else? Hussie appears to have forgotten that the Alternian concept of justice is different from the Earth one.

FAILURE ARTIST: And what we would consider a “bad guy” wouldn’t be the same on Alternia. There’s tons of trolls murdering other trolls on Hiveswap Friendsim without any hint that’s illegal. It’s probably completely lawful for a highblood to kill a lowblood just because the lowblood annoyed them.

WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 29

BRIGHT: Maybe. I’d say what this shows us, and is intended to show us, is that Terezi’s sense of justice isn’t just based on Alternian law, but on her own moral code. The law made it perfectly acceptable for Vriska to feed lowbloods to her lusus regardless of whether they’d done anything, but Terezi didn’t think it was right, and for her that superseded the law. She’s the ‘good cop’ not because she always follows the book, but because she’s willing to ignore it.

We also know she thought Vriska was on the same page as her. Note that Terezi makes two accusations here — the first is that Vriska killed people who don’t deserve it, and the second is that Vriska lied to Terezi about doing so.

CHEL: That may be what it’s intended to show us, but what we’ve already seen is that she worships the law; she draws and gleefully licks pictures of the head of the troll court, His Honorable Tyranny, and she shows no concern in her roleplay with hypothetically executing people for relatively trivial crimes. That makes this a bit… shaky, IMO.

BRIGHT: True. Terezi may have stopped killing since her FLARP days (or, at least, we get no indication that she’s still doing so), but it doesn’t seem to have shaken her belief in the Alternian legal system. Just her belief in Vriska, who even brings up a similar point.

AG: Well if you want to know what I think, you should start changing your tune. AG: Cause even though you got all these highfalutin morals and fancy reserv8tions, you know as well as me that a killer is a killer is a killer! AG: There 8n't no ch8nging your ways for good, and one d8y you're going to flail that silly l8ttle cane of yours and not find n8thin to 8ump into, and fall f8ce first into the shit ag8in. AG: And you're going to do something t8rri8le to some8ody and wish you could t8ke it 8ack 8ut you c8n't!!!!!!!! AG: And then you'll work hard to win 8ack their trust, and you'll try and try and tr8, and you'll see how hard it is! AG: You'll seeeeeeee!

Vriska’s making this all about her own feelings about Terezi abandoning her, but she’s not wrong.

Vriska hears the doomsday device exploding and the subsequent rockslide, and goes to  find out what it is. Terezi tells her not to get crushed.

The next page jumps back in time again -- this time, quite far back. Terezi’s eyes are normal, and she’s talking to Aradia about Tavros’s recovery. Aradia says he’s probably paralysed for life. Terezi brings up the possibility of getting him robo-prosthetics, but after the Vriska debacle Aradia is firmly against having anything to do with bluebloods.

CHEL: Terezi warns Aradia that revenge attempts will end badly and she wants to handle it. Aradia says Vriska isn’t able to control her, but Terezi says Vriska will find a way to harm her anyway. They lament how they were both distracted by the same person.

AA: wh0 was he anyway GC: PR3TTY SUR3 1T WAS VR1SKAS FR13ND AA: what was he d0ing there AA: watching us GC: WHO KNOWS GC: H3S NOT R34LLY H3R FR13ND THOUGH GC: YOU SHOULD S33 HOW H3 T4LKS 4BOUT H3R B3H1ND H3R B4CK GC: SH3 H4S NO 1D34 HOW B4D H3S PL4Y1NG H3R GC: BUT TH3N 1 DONT TH1NK H3 KNOWS HOW B4D SH3S PL4Y1NG H1M 31TH3R

This sounds like they mean Equius, but we’ll see. Aradia feels she’s letting Vriska win by doing nothing, but Terezi has a plan. She confirms that her friendship with Vriska is over.

Cut to Aradia’s house, and here I need to go into a bit more detail. This is her house:

Aradia’s a maroonblood, the lowest of the low on the hemospectrum, peasantry and cannon fodder and supposedly extremely numerous. Yet her house looks to be about the size of the entire block of flats I live in, and she lives in it alone, with no other buildings at all in sight. In the next page, we see inside her house, which looks exactly the same as all the others; she has piles of roleplaying books and posters and a computer, and nothing looks to be in disrepair.

WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 30

BRIGHT: Her house also looks a lot like Tavros’s, what with the windmill feature on top and the brown hangings rather than maroon, which threw me off at first.

CHEL: We’ll talk about this more later. For now, let’s stick with the most noticeable thing; Aradia is alive! Her skirt is untattered and her eyes have colour and pupils. Her lusus is alive too, napping beside her. It’s not quite clear what it is exactly; it has a sheep-like head, but its body is long and slim with much bigger hind legs than forelegs. Could be supposed to be dragon-like? I’ve also seen it interpreted as kangaroo-like. I don’t think we ever get a better view of it.

Anyway, Aradia knows Terezi’s advice is sound, but she can’t bear not to do something to Make her pay. She puts her hands up to her temples, and the image fades back and forth with one of wrapped troll corpses in Spidermom’s web…

It's a shame it had to come to this. You don't like summoning the spirits of the dead to settle scores.

But if she had to face her victims again, maybe she'd finally learn to feel remorse.

OOOOOOOOOO

This begs the question, how the fuck can the highbloods oppress people who not only hugely outnumber them but can shoot lasers from their eyes, control animals, and summon the dead at will? Well, there’s actually some explanation for that. The player trolls all appear to have unusual levels of power, for whatever their given powers are; most maroonbloods can’t do this. In Hiveswap a main character is a more typical maroonblood, who can just about bend spoons with his telekinesis and not much else (though we haven’t seen him speak with dead yet, and it’s possible he’s better at that). Not all trolls even have their caste’s powers, as far as I can tell, as we do see a yellow in Hiveswap Friendsim who’s not a psionic and some ceruleans who don’t seem to have mind-control powers as well. Head or eye injuries, which aren’t exactly rare in Alternia, can cause the loss of said powers. Also, the highest blood castes have powers of their own and other things to hold over the lowbloods’ heads. It’ll be a while till we get to that, but I’ll say now it is convincing, we do not have an Oppressed Mages scenario.

Anyway, Aradia does her thing…

As Vriska cowers on her floor, White Text Guy messages her again. Vriska replies angrily, ghosts looming over her shoulders.

Aren't you going to kill her?

AG: Who????????

Your friend.

The one who summoned the spirits.

AG: Will that make them go away?

Does it matter?

She brought them here to torment you. This obviously warrants revenge.

Vriska asks why WTG doesn’t kill Aradia instead, since he helped kill Tavros; he replies “All I did was stand somewhere for a few minutes. I just gave you an opportunity to do something you wanted to do anyway.” So, seems it wasn’t Equius they meant earlier. Vriska protests she never intended to kill her gaming companions, and blames him.

Again, I didn't talk you into anything, nor am I doing so now.

You were, and are, going to do this regardless.

I only ever place myself into positions of tangential involvement with events that will bring about my employer's entry into this universe.

I oversee the events as they take place, and ever so slightly nudge them into motion when necessary.

BRIGHT: Looks like Aradia and Terezi haven’t told her Tavros survived, which is eminently sensible. This conversation also highlights another Vriska trait: That she’s a very active person, but will try to shift responsibility as soon as she doesn’t like the consequences. That could be a result of her upbringing -- Vriska had to actively go and kill people for Spidermom, but she wasn’t responsible for the overall situation. (Although -- how much did she do to ameliorate it? By the time SGRUB starts, Spidermom’s far too big to fit into Vriska’s home. Vriska might have been able to get away with not feeding her at that point; there’s not much Spidermom can do if she can’t get to her.)

CHEL: The later addition to the canon, Pesterquest, claims that the lusii can psychically nag their charges and she could bother Vriska that way, but that directly contradicts Act 5, in which the trolls want to prototype their lusii so that they’ll be able to communicate properly with them for the first time, and also couldn’t Vriska just move further away?

BRIGHT: Inertia is very much a thing, and people do often just settle into a rut of ‘this is the way things are’ even when something could be changed, so it’s not improbable that it wouldn’t occur to Vriska to move — come to that, I don’t believe it occurs to anyone else either — but the fact that it doesn’t occur to her does say something about her character. 

CHEL: Also, why didn’t Vriska feed the spider on animals? The possibility is never so much as considered by her or anyone else, though it seems the most obvious thing to do. Sure, the spider might be picky, but as we said, it can’t leave the valley due to its size, or it’d be hunting for itself. If it’s left with the choice to eat cows or die, it’d presumably pick the former, especially since the lusii aren’t supposed to be sapient and thus wouldn’t have the capacity for spite. For assuming that Vriska did what she had to when such a screamingly obvious better option is never addressed, here we go with a new count, which will rise whenever Vriska’s horrible actions are excused.

ALL THE LUCK: 1

 Back to the scene, Scratch claims omniscience, which Vriska mocks.

AG: Sure you know a lot, 8ut I know for a FACT there's stuff you don't know.

That's true.

But the gaps in my knowledge exist by design.

They are the pillars of shadow on which my comprehensive vision is built.

Necessary pockets of void meant to effectuate outcomes I've foreseen and which will require my influence.

Each dark pocket, in time, will be filled.

[...]

I don't lie.

Deception is only necessary for those like you to achieve their objectives.

I play with my cards face up.

Isn't it funny how during our various matches, I can tell you what my moves will be in advance, and still win?

Vriska, angered by this, does in fact plan to kill Aradia; Not much point in living with all these moaning spooks just to spite some guy you don't give a shit about. She can’t control Aradia because Aradia’s own powers get in the way, but there are other people she can use.

How about this guy? Unfortunately, you can only control him about half the time.

Then again, that should be all the time you need.

Cut back to Aradia’s place, and she receives a message from Vriska, telling her her boyfriend is outside. 

BRIGHT: Vriska also lightheartedly tells Aradia she’s sorry, and that she’ll make it up to ‘him’ someday. Presumably ‘he’ is meant to be Tavros, except that Vriska seemed to think Tavros was dead in literally the last conversation she had. This is probably just a slip-up on Hussie’s part, but it’s possible to read this as Vriska referring to a different ‘he’ entirely, considering what’s about to happen.

CHEL: Aradia looks, and sees a figure hovering telekinetically over the fields....

Note what’s in his hand. You do not under any circumstances eat the mind honey… His eyes start flashing and Aradia looks afraid, but we suddenly cut to a view of Alternia, and then to a closeup of its green moon. The prompt instructs us to Be the white text guy, and we meet him in a very familiar-looking green mansion.

You try to be the white text guy, but fail to be the white text guy. No one can be the white text guy except for the white text guy.

The white text guy is known as Doc Scratch.

He is an officer of an indestructible demon known as Lord English. His job is to pave the way for the arrival of his master, who will be summoned upon the termination of the universe. He has worked at this task for many centuries, and will continue to do so until THE GREAT UNDOING.

Scratch is Alternia's FIRST GUARDIAN. Every planet destined for intelligent life has such an entity meant to protect it, and facilitate the planet's ultimate purpose. A first guardian is typically almost as old as the planet itself, and each has a unique, circuitous origin through the knots of paradox space. They can be born into a great diversity of forms, though they all share a common, especially potent genetic sequence. 

Remember Rose’s MEOW book, and how DD used it to create Becquerel? Yep.

The code grants them near omnipotence, and when merged with a host of great intelligence, near omniscience as well.

BRIGHT: Only near-omniscence, however. Scratch is surprised to find Terezi contacting him, but he’s able to work out that she got Sollux to help pretty fast:

Occasionally I discover there are things I have not always known.

It gives me the opportunity to make deductions, which are practically always flawless.

It's gratifying.

He also suggests she call him ‘Mr. Vanilla Milkshake’, and then hints that Aradia might not be straightforwardly dead by stating that Sollux and Terezi believe she is dead, and will soon believe she is not, both of which are true statements about their beliefs rather than reality.

Props to Hussie on this: I’m pretty sure every Homestuck fan wants to punch Scratch in the face. He’s just so obnoxious. 

Terezi, however, refuses to let Scratch keep derailing her for long. She wants Scratch to get involved in their feud again, and she has a good reason for him: She knows how Vriska’s been able to come so close to beating Scratch in their games lately. Before she can tell him, though, she needs to talk to Vriska again.

She starts by asking how Vriska feels about killing Aradia, after she promised not to. Vriska responds with dramatic insincerity about how she feels awful, and then says Terezi should be happy that Team Charge is out of the picture. 

AG: Uuuuuuuugh, what do you want from me????????

GC: 1M NOT SUR3

GC: 1 GU3SS 1M LOOK1NG FOR SOM3 R34SON TO CH4NG3 MY M1ND

GC: 1 DONT KNOW WH4T YOU C4N S4Y TH4TLL DO 1T

GC: 1 SORT4 HOP3 TH3R3S SOM3TH1NG THOUGH

In the end, there isn’t. Terezi tells Vriska she’ll be dead in a couple of minutes, and to ‘CONSULT W1TH YOUR L1TTL3 4DV4NT4G3’ if she doesn’t believe it, then leaves the conversation.

Vriska’s little advantage turns out to be a MAGIC CUE BALL, which is similar to a magic 8 ball except that it’s predictions are specific and accurate, and it lacks a portal through which the user can read said predictions. Fortunately that’s not an obstacle for Vriska: Her VISION EIGHTFOLD allows her to see through the opaque casing.

CHEL: Vision Eightfold is the vision from the one of Vriska’s eyes which has seven pupils, which she covered with an eyepatch with seven rubies on it when she was FLARPing. Also remember that Jade had a Magic Cue Ball but couldn’t read it? Yeah, it’s another one.

BRIGHT: One other thing: According to rumour, it used to belong to the man on the moon.

As Vriska asks the cueball whether she should be worried about Terezi’s threat (answer: YES), Terezi lets Scratch know where his missing property has gone. Vriska asks the cueball how it’s going to happen…

I WILL EXPLODE IN YOUR FACE.

Boom.

This section is one of my favourite Terezi moments. It really shows off Terezi’s ability to outthink and manoeuvre people. She’s never spoken to Scratch before, but she still plays him against Vriska easily.

CHEL: This is why Vriska has a plain eyepatch and a robot arm in her future appearances, but she’s otherwise fine. Bluebloods are tough, apparently.

BRIGHT: Back in the future, Spidermom has survived the rubble falling on her, but just barely. Vriska puts her out of her misery with her magic dice, which summon up a massive guillotine and decapitate the lusus, drenching Vriska in spider blood.

GORE GALORE: 11

The decapitation sets off another landslide, sending Equius’s house straight down on Vriska’s head, but before it can land, a portal opens underneath it and transports it into the Medium.

Vriska promptly jumps on Trollian to freak out about this, because her plan depended on her getting Aradia’s surprise present from Equius to pass along and then Aradia and Vriska entering the Medium together, and never mind that a house was about to fall on her -- in fact, when Aradia points out that Vriska was about to die, Vriska accuses her of planning this. Aradia placidly agrees.

CHEL: This is part of my evidence for thinking Vriska might not be neurotypical. Not the priorities most people would have. Also, meanwhile, note that the lusii have the same blood colour as their charges, while the non-lusus animals Nepeta killed were black and had red blood. I’m not sure whether that’s a species trait, or a side effect of the weird bond between them (doesn’t make a lot of biological sense, but then this is basically fantasy with a sci-fi coat of paint).

Vriska is enraged by things not going the way she planned; her grand gesture of apology, the robot body, will now be handed over by Equius and not her, ruining her chance to be friends again with Aradia. Again, she doesn’t seem to understand how apologies work.

AA: were we ever really friends

AG: Yeah!!!!!!!!

AG: I don't know. I felt like we were even if you didn't think so.

AG: I guess I'm not very good at acting like a friend. Or saying stuff like, hey friend! You're my friend! It doesn't really occur to me.

For some strange reason related to her prototyping with the frog statue, Aradia types out “ribbit” into the chatbox, and informs Vriska she’s not on the Blue team as she expected, enraging Vriska further. Vriska accuses her of taking revenge, which Aradia denies, saying Vriska was always going to be on the Red team, and that she doesn’t care about her death.

AG: You're so infuri8ing! Why c8n't you just h8 me? It would 8e a lot easier th8t way.

AG: Or at least feel 8othered or annoyed or S8METHING! God!!!!!!!!

AG: May8e I sh8uld just rip my he8rt out of my chest and pound it to a 8loody pulp here on my desk with my sup8r strong ro8ot arm.

AG: Pound pound pound pound pound pound pound pound!

AG: Look at that, more nasty 8lue 8lood all over me. Why not! Might as well op8n the floodg8s and p8nt my whole hive with this oh so envia8le cerulean SWILL.

AG: 8ecause clearly it's up to me to feel em8tions for the 8oth of us, you misera8le soulless witch!

AA: 0_0

AG: I h88888888 you!

AG: H8 h8 h8 h8 h8 h8 h8 haaaaaaaate!

AG: I only regret killing you cause it m8de you so 8ORING!!!!!!!!

AA: s0rry

Aradia assures her that the teams are meaningless, but being on the Red team will put Vriska in the position they need her in. Vriska’s confused and angry, and leaves the chat.

In Equius’ LAND OF CAVES AND SILENCE, he trolls Aradia again, telling her he will be the sole leader, which she doesn’t care about. He’s surprised she isn’t objecting, and says he needs a towel.

CT: D --> Never mind

CT: D --> I'm trying to stay professional about this

AA: ab0ut what

AA: what are y0u talking ab0ut

CT: D --> Forget it

CT: D --> It's just pleasant to consort with one of lesser breeding who clearly understands her place

He’s been established to suffer from hyperhydrosis, but he’s clearly also supposed to be getting off on this, which, since he’s thirteen, is icky to read.

CALL CPA PLEASE: 12

It only gets worse.

CT: D --> I 100k forward to seeing how well you serve me, server player

AA: uh

AA: thats n0t quite the meaning 0f the w0rd server

CT: D --> What do you mean

AA: as y0ur server i manipulate y0ur envir0nment t0 help y0u advance

CT: D --> I don't understand

CT: D --> Are you

CT: D --> Are you saying

CT: D --> That

CT: D --> You are in a position of control over me

AA: i supp0se s0

CT: D --> Oh

AA: what

CT: D --> Oh my God

He babbles about how he needs fresh air or another towel, getting so agitated he actually drops an F-bomb, which he immediately covers up with “Fiddlesticks”. He says he wants to break something, and Aradia offers to break something for him, as she’s developed an interest in breaking things recently. Next page, she flings an “abluti0n trap” through his wall. 

FAILURE ARTIST: The running gag of girls fucking up boy’s homes with bathroom appliances continues!

CHEL: He’s very happy, except about her commoner slang.

CT: D --> In fact, this is an order from your leader

CT: D --> Call things by their proper names

AA: what

AA: y0u want me t0 call it a bath tub

AA: that s0unds ridicul0us

As FA noted, this bit of worldbuilding ends up retconned out with all trolls calling things by strange rewordings later on.

Whatever it’s called, Equius asks her to throw it through the wall again. She asks if that’s an order, and he can’t decide.

CT: D --> You could cause quite a bother for me, with the power you wield

CT: D --> I can do nothing to stop you, peasant girl

CT: D --> It's so magnificently depraved

CALL CPA PLEASE: 13

Aradia ribbits again and he takes it for roleplaying, but commands her to continue to do as she pleases. He tells her he’s bringing the robot body, and muses on whether she should actually be co-leader again; in fact, he decides, she should be the actual leader, in secret, through him. She points out that’s what they’re doing anyway.

CT: D --> You take to authority well for one of your b100d

AA: i d0nt have bl00d

CT: D --> Not yet

CT: D --> But soon your heart will beat anew, and through it, fresh b100d and fresh passion

AA: 0_0

CALL CPA PLEASE: 14

Equius proceeds to STRONGJUMP right up to his first Gate, punching off an ogre’s head as he goes, and to STRONGFALL out into LOQAM, where Aradia waits. Equius hands over the robot and Aradia enters it; she seems happy, but Equius cautiously asks if she feels anything else.

EQUIUS: D --> Can you detect anything within you might describe as

EQUIUS: D --> Smoldering passion

[...]

ARADIABOT: 0h g0d

ARADIABOT: 0H MY G0D WHAT DID Y0U D0!

ARADIABOT: did y0u pr0gram this r0b0t t0 have feelings f0r y0u?

ARADIABOT: R0MANTIC FEELINGS???

EQUIUS: D --> Hrrrk

ARADIABOT: ANSWER ME BLUE BL00D SCUM

EQUIUS: D --> I

EQUIUS: D --> Yes

EQUIUS: D --> Uh

EQUIUS: D --> It's a chip in your heart

EQUIUS: D --> Is that not ok

Understandably, it is emphatically not.

GORE GALORE: 12

Now, this is undeniably a really, really, really creepy thing to do. I’m not sure how much blame can be applied to Equius here, though; he’s been raised in a society which would presumably tell him she would have to accept his advances no matter what, considering their caste difference. In a horrifying way, the chip might have been, in his mind, the nicer option. Still, as I said, creepy.

CALL CPA PLEASE: 15

BRIGHT: I think it’s telling that he asks if it’s not okay after Aradia freaks out, as though he honestly hadn’t considered that Aradia might have a problem with it. Specifically, up until that point, Equius seems to be interacting with Aradia more like she’s a prop than a person — it doesn’t seem to occur to him that she might not want what he wants, unless their wants conflict in a way that he finds titillating. Then she freaks out and he’s surprised. And that in turn speaks volumes about how lowbloods are viewed by highbloods in wider society.

Contrast Vriska, who absolutely realises that people down spectrum can have their own agendas and emotional reactions; she just does her own thing anyway. Vriska is actively malicious; Equius is, at least in this case, accidentally malicious. Note that he doesn’t make any effort to prevent her from removing the chip once he realises she’s distressed. (Not that he really gets a chance.)

Equius in particular also seems to have a problem about slotting people into roles in general -- he does it with Gamzee, too, although since Gamzee is higher-blooded than him, he has to at least face the fact that Gamzee doesn’t fit into his role. He comes across as very sheltered.

FAILURE ARTIST: Equius considers it such a good thing to be a highblood that he thinks he’s doing her the greatest favor by turning her into one. 

CHEL: This also brings up the question of where he got all that blue blood. I hope it’s synthetic. If not, he’s already said he doesn’t kill animals, so I’m not sure whether it’s creepier if he killed another troll for it or if he slowly drained it off from his own.

Aradia’s not contemplating that, too busy crushing the artificial heart and slapping the shit out of Equius for multiple pages, before, er…

Yes, she’s apparently making out with him as a reward for violating her mind, even after the chip was removed. 

BRIGHT: The first time I read Homestuck, I thought that was meant to imply that not all of the programming was gone.

FAILURE ARTIST: Hussie did confirm the programming was gone. He compared it to a failed roofying.

CHEL: This is a bit of a shock, but it makes somewhat more sense when we see more of troll culture, not long in the future. Still, right now it’s probably upsetting for a number of readers because that part of troll culture hasn’t been established, so…

CALL CPA PLEASE: 16

CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 41

[homespork-review]

HOMESPORK ACT 5 ACT 1: Mobius Double Plusungood, Part 1

CHEL: Yes, Act 5 Act 1; here begin the “act acts”. Just go with it.

FAILURE ARTIST: Welcome to Act 5 a.k.a. The Act Everyone Skipped To So They Could Get To Those Grey Demons. While I was a reader before Act 5, I wasn’t a huge fan until this part. The trolls are a great species. Different enough to be fascinating, but not different enough humans can’t relate. And what exactly is in their pants? That’s for the fandom to figure out.

BRIGHT: And fandom accepted the challenge with enthusiasm.

CHEL: Also, they’re fuggin’ adorable. It took me a while to get used to nonhumans in the sprite style and I thought they were creepy-looking at first, but we also see them in the more noodly style used in the dramatic moments with the kids, like the fall of Prospit, and that helped them grow on me a lot.

FAILURE ARTIST: The Act starts off with a grey planet with a green moon and a pink moon. A prompt box like the one for the Kids’ introductions is above it. In the box are letters in a script blatantly stolen borrowed from The Elder Scrolls games and turned 180 degrees. (Later on, when Hussie made a game that people paid money for, he couldn’t exactly use a stolen font so the team made an all-new font. But the old font is probably in the print books). Anyway, in case you’re curious, the letters spell out “Turdodor Fuckball”. This is the wrong name, and the right name is…Trollplanet. Though it’s called Alternia in the flavor text below and everywhere else.

So starts the arc called Hivebent. We cut to CG in a very grey room flapping his mouth occasionally at nothing. He’s introduced much the way John was.

This young troll stands in his respiteblock. It just so happens that today, the 12th bilunar perigee of the 6th dark season's equinox, is the day of this young troll's larval awakening, also known as his wriggling day. Though it was six solar sweeps ago he was given life, it is only today he will be given a name! Six Alternian solar sweeps, for convenient reference, is equivalent to thirteen Earth years. Earth, also for convenient reference, is a planet that does not yet exist. What will the name of this young troll be?

However, like Dave, he attacks the prompt box. He doesn’t want to do all the little gags and patterns.

CHEL: Thank God!

FAILURE ARTIST: This Hivebent arc will go much faster than the four acts before it. No dawdling along for this species. There’s twelve characters to be introduced and characterized before this is done.

CHEL: That said, it’s still going to be much, much longer than the others.

FAILURE ARTIST: So, CG’s name is Karkat Vantas. All of the troll names have a 6-6 pattern and are usually named after astrological and mythological motifs. Karkata is the Sanskrit name for the constellation Cancer and Vantas...is a prostate cancer treatment drug. Don’t look at me, I didn’t name him.

CHEL: It’s also possibly connected to “vanitas”, relating to Karkat’s simultaneous arrogance and lack of self-worth.

FAILURE ARTIST: Today is Karkat’s wriggling day. Let’s meet the birthday boy. He loves movies, though the narrator says he has terrible taste. In his room, there’s edited posters of “50 First Dates”, “Serendipity”, and “Hitch” that makes them look like troll movies, including lots of small type for the title. Like John, he likes to program but he’s not good at it. In fact, he’s so bad his programs are basically computer viruses. He wants to join a military organization called the THRESHECUTIONERS when he grows up. His weapon of choice is the sickle, possibly as a counterpart to John’s hammer.

He chats with his friends on a new program called Trollian, which is a reference to the real-life chat program Trillian. Fans forget that Trollian was a new program, except for Nepetaquest where the plot revolves around the making of that improbable software.

CHEL: Which begs the question of how they communicated before. Most of them don’t seem to have met each other in real life yet. Obvious answer is a different chat program, but in that case, why draw attention to Trollian being new instead of just having it be how they communicated from the start? It doesn’t really add anything IMO.

FAILURE ARTIST: Anyway, talking with his friends drives him BATSHIT UP THE FUCKING BELFRY, which is a very human phrase.

The first prompt Karkat gets is to examine the slimy pod in his room. This pod is a recuperacoon and serves as a bed. Trolls need that slime to help assuage the terrible visions of blood and carnage that plague the dark subconscious of your species. Why do they have these species-wide bad dreams and how does slime help? It’s never said.

CHEL: The slime appears to be a form of drug, possibly a sedative. In Hiveswap we see it also has minor healing properties. Why trolls would have evolved to consistently suffer nightmares isn’t brought up here, but there are possible explanations later.

FAILURE ARTIST: Actually, after Act 6, recuperacoons aren’t mentioned. Also, oddly enough, the narration says sleeping is done nightly but we later learn trolls are nocturnal. The terms night and day aren’t used consistently in Hivebent.

WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 20

Karkat gets into the pod, but immediately regrets it. He changes his clothes (off-screen of course) into clothes that look exactly the same. This is because Trolls think fashion is stupid.

Next, he examines his movie posters. Turns out trolls have their own version of John Cusack, among other celebrities. Troll Adam Sandler is his favorite actor and one person he doesn’t want to do violence against. In his narration, he thinks Sweet Baby Jegus though Jegus isn’t actually a thing in troll culture.

WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 21

Karkat tries to captchalogue his sickle and we get some more sylladex hijinx! His modus becomes too heavy and literally falls through the floor. I thought picking up weapons was different from captchaloging stuff? We’re told these hijinx won’t last long and eventually Karkat trades his modus with his hacker friend. Good. For now, he just picks up the big black book on his dresser.

The big black book is about a programming language called ~ATH and for some reason is in Roman script. It’s a morbid little language and there’s a cartoon figure of the Grim Reaper and a fake (or real?) quote from Troll Will Smith. Karkat finds this language incredibly hard. There’s probably some sick programmer jokes I’m missing here.

CHEL: There’s one I’ve been informed of; ~ is called a tilde, so the name of the program is “tilde-ath”, or “till death”. I can’t say I recognise any others though.

FAILURE ARTIST: Karkat steps outside. He lives in a huge grey and red house (or hive) in a suburb as sterile as John’s. Trolls create their own homes as toddlers after beating the trials in the brooding caverns. First hint of how harsh Alternia is, yet everyone has their own housing which is sweet.

It's almost as if your people have placed great cultural importance on teaching children to become architecturally adept while very young. It has been this way since ancient times. No one seems to know why that is.

Hmmm…

Karkat almost has a poetic moment while looking out at the moons, but he rejects poetry. He also rejects mailboxes, which trolls don’t have because they have no mail.

CHEL: Do they mean no paper letters because they all have internet? I recall that they do receive packages.

FAILURE ARTIST: I think they have courier service but no dedicated government postal system.

So instead of poetry, Karkat talks about AMBITION. He wants to be something great but he doesn’t know what exactly. We’ll see where this character arc takes him.

We get a little detail about the Alternian calendar and it concludes with “You have a feeling it's going to be a long night.”

Karkat goes back inside. He checks out a Game Grub magazine with a disgusting image of a leaking grub and a DVD for his favorite television show. The show is THE THRESH PRINCE OF BEL AIR, which is a take-off on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air but is about a green threshecutioner cadet who sasses up the bluebloods in his flaysquad pretty good. The “green” and “blueblood” parts aren’t turns of phrases but literal. Given the strict hierarchy we find out trolls are under, it’s amazing there’s a series about a sassy subordinate. Maybe he’s only sassy in Karkat’s mind.

CHEL: Actually, that’s not too unbelievable.

FAILURE ARTIST: The title of the show doesn’t follow the convention of troll movie titles and that’s because 1) television is a newer medium and 2) it would ruin the joke.

Finally, Karkat gets down to business on his computer. His first friend to “troll” him has a purple Capricorn sign. Now, this friend is a character that though I’m now quite attached to, I didn’t much care about them in the beginning. I’ll try to be objective though.

terminallyCapricious [TC] began trolling carcinoGeneticist [CG] TC: wHaT iS uUuUuP mY iNvErTeBrOtHeR? CG: WHAT IN THE SWEET ALMIGHTY TAINTCHAFING FUCK DO YOU WANT. TC: NoT a MoThErFuCkInG tHiNg BrO. TC: oThEr ThAn I bE cHeCkIn OuT hOw My BeSt MoThErFuCkIn FrIeNd Is At Yo.

Yes, my first thought too was “that’s a really annoying typing style”. Karkat agrees and complains about TC’s typing style. TC temporarily goes all lowercase but says it feels uncomfortable. Karkat complains more about how awful TC is and wonders what he did to deserve such a terrible friend. Instead of being offended, TC says friendship is beautiful and confusingly calls it a TrOlL dIsEaSe. We’ll see some stuff that suggests trolls don’t have friendship or at least don’t consider it in high regard but mostly trolls have friends like humans do.

BRIGHT: Despite his protests, Karkat has eleven friends, in a society that is not set up to facilitate this. I’m pretty sure that when I was his age I had maybe three.

FAILURE ARTIST: TC waxes on miracles like the carbonation in a bottle of Faygo. Yeah, trolls have Faygo.

CHEL: That’s a gag, though, so no WSP point.

FAILURE ARTIST: Karkat tells him that’s just carbonation but TC rejects science as just stealing the magic from miracles.

CHEL: It comes up more clearly later, but we’ll tell you now that TC’s entire character at this point, especially that line, is basically a shoutout to the Insane Clown Posse song “Miracles”.

Watch on YouTube

FAILURE ARTIST: After some more bantering, TC gets down to business: TA is going to play a game. Karkat says he’s not interested but TC says TA is Karkat’s best friend, which is sad when you consider TC calls Karkat “best friend”.

CHEL: TA, if you don’t remember, is twinArmageddons, the computer programmer.

FAILURE ARTIST: TC gets distracted by a horn going off and even types out a surprised yell. Karkat tell TC to get rid of the horns and TC says “MaN yOu KnOw YoU wAnNa GiVe My HoRnS a GoOd SqUeEzE. :o)” which sounds really flirty. Karkat says if he meets a kid as annoying as TC, he’ll convert to TC’s religion. TC is happy about this. With that, the conversation ends.

We cut to TC and he’s a motherfucking clown, baby! But I’ve already re-capped so much and need to give someone else a turn.

CHEL: Okay, I shall step up! TC’s actual name proves to be GAMZEE MAKARA, and he’s wearing a purple Capricorn sign. The name Gamzee was picked by a forumite as a reference to another user who went by Gammy, but it may also be a reference to “Gämse”, the German name for the chamois goat. Makara is the Sanskrit name for Capricorn, and also the name for a type of creature from Hindu folklore which would include the Capricorn sea-goat. There are several other layers of possible and probably-coincidental meaning listed on the Wiki, which we’d have to bring up spoilers to discuss, so we’ll save that for later.

Beyond his name and sign, Gamzee has clown makeup, explosively curly hair, long spiral horns, and a slightly glazed expression. Nightmarish pictures of evil clowns plaster his walls, his floor is piled with bicycle horns, juggling clubs, and Faygo bottles, and an oversized unicycle is propped against the wall. When he picks up a Faygo bottle and his “husktop” computer, his MIRACLE MODUS is seen, a hideously complicated mishmash of various styles which flickers and spins obnoxiously. Even Gamzee doesn’t know how it works, he just likes to watch the colours.

FAILURE ARTIST: Gamzee belongs to a RATHER OBSCURE CULT that believes in a BAND OF ROWDY AND CAPRICIOUS MINSTRELS who are CLOWNS OF A GRIM PERSUASION WHICH MAY NOT BE IN FULL POSSESSION OF THEIR MENTAL FACULTIES. Basically, he’s a Juggalo who worships the troll equivalent of Insane Clown Posse. Though the cult is called obscure and said to be looked down upon, later it is shown to be a state-sponsored religion. I guess maybe it’s just Gamzee’s particular denomination that’s looked down upon.

CHEL: “Obscure” also means “hidden”, so the retcon could be justified in the sense of it being mysterious? Or it might be related to spoilery Hiveswap theories. We can get into those if we ever get round to Hiveswap.

Gamzee attempts to ride the unicycle, but fails - unsurprisingly, since it’s taller than he is and he attempts to ride it by standing on the saddle. He falls off into a pile of horns, and decides instead to sample the luridly green pie on the counter, which turns out to in fact be made of the same SOPOR SLIME that trolls sleep in.

You aren't supposed to eat that slime. It does funny things to a troll's head. But you were never taught that on account of a lousy upbringing. Your custodian was always out to sea.

Gamzee arms himself with a juggling club to use against the alleged hostile SEA DWELLERS and heads out to wait for his missing guardian.

FAILURE ARTIST: His hive appears to not have a front door so I don’t know what’s keeping the hostile sea dwellers out.

CHEL: Someone contacts him online and he intends to settle down with a Faygo and answer, but he doesn’t know how to retrieve things from his miracle modus. Gamzee performs a short prayer to your beloved MIRTHFUL MESSIAHS, the faces of the two members of Insane Clown Posse superimposed over the background, and throws a pinch of SPECIAL STARDUST in his face. We never find out what exactly “special stardust” is; it appears to just be glitter, but it comes up much later. His attempts fail, however, as the modus instead launches his Faygo miles out to sea.

You wonder if you can just... Just sort of reach over... And...

Apparently the sylladex modus can be physically reached, so there was no need for the endless pages of shenanigans in the first place. *quiet rage* But anyway, gallowsCalibrator is trolling him.

FAILURE ARTIST: GC asks G4MZ33Z if he’d like to play G4M3Z3Z with her. He replies "hEy YeAh ThAt SoUnDs LiKe ThE mOtHeRfUcKiN sHiT's BiTcHtItS!" She says something very tsundere in reply:

GC: 1T SUR3 1S H4RD TO 1GNOR3 TH3 W31RD TH1NGS YOU S4Y SOM3T1M3S! GC: BUT 1M GONN4 GC: TH3 ONLY R34SON 1M 4SK1NG YOU 1S B3C4US3 YOUR N4M3 1S L1K3 G4M3 GC: 4ND NO OTH3R R34SON GC: G3T 1T??? >:]

Gamzee isn’t offended she said this and GC gets annoyed he’s always rolling with the punches. She says that’s why Karkat can���t stand him. Harsh in hindsight. GC gets down to business and tells Gamzee they are going to H4V3 SOM3 MOTH3RFUCK1NG SH1TTY B1TCH3S PL4Y1NG TOG3TH3R. He asks if they could play later because he’s waiting for tHe OlD gOaT (which happens to also be a nickname for Satan).

TC: yOu KnOw HoW iT iS wItH fAmIlY. GC: NO, NOT R34LLY! GC: 4DURRRR DURR DURP TC: Oh YeAh... GC: DURRRRRRRRRRRRR GC: W4Y TO GO, HOW DO3S TH4T STUP1D BOTTL3D SYRUP OF YOURS T4ST3 W1TH YOUR HOOF SO F4R UP YOUR MOUTH??? GC: >:] TC: sOoOoOoOrY.

This is the first time we find out GC has an unusual homelife. Yet it isn’t true that she has no family.

BRIGHT: And given how rarely Gamzee’s guardian is around, it’s not like he has much of a family either. Or a standard homelife.

CHEL: That’s also an... excessive response to a slip-up, but from what we see later, that’s how almost all the trolls talk to each other all the time.

FAILURE ARTIST: It’s also problematic, because she’s doing an ableist imitation of the speech of people with mental disabilities. Though I suppose trolls aren’t meant to be PC.

CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 19

Gamzee suggests GC play with Karkat instead. She rejects this idea and says she used to play with him but he got too annoying. Gamzee then agrees to play and says give him a minute. She says he’ll just space out and that’s what he does. When he gets back into the conversation, he makes a second faux pas.

TC: hAvE yOu EvEr EvEn SeEn ThE oCeAn? TC: oR i MeAn SmElLeD iT... TC: SoRrY. GC: >:[

People really get on this but it’s just the regular type of mistake people make while talking to blind or sight-impaired friends and he did apologize. Other characters say worse and never apologize. Some readers who know what happens later might attribute malice but right now he’s just a guy who does a lot of troll pot and makes mistakes.

CHEL: I know when I was eleven the blind kid in my class and I had a sort of running gag of “see you later”. It also isn’t very clear whether either of them is actually hurt by anything the other is saying. They don’t seem to be.

This is also probably a time to bring up certain things about Gamzee’s cultural coding. Even though we later find out he’s one of the highest-ranking trolls, certain cues about him would make people think of a lower-class human, namely his syntax, his eating semi-inedible substances (lack of access to other food?) and his love for cheap gross soda. (I’ve drunk Faygo. It’s weird.) This could just be a troll thing not being exactly the same as human things and also down to his guardian not being there, but there’s more.

Gamzee’s word usage involves a lot of quirks which are usually associated with African American Vernacular English, e.g. addressing others as “brother” or “sister” and using “be” instead of “am” or “are” or just leaving them out completely. His hair is probably supposed to look unbrushed, but it can also be interpreted as textured. His religious behaviours get described with the word “voodoo” a lot, and while this is a bit of a stretch I personally interpreted his typing and syntax as a Southern drawl plus he lives close to water, thus cementing an association with actual Vodoun in my head even though his actual practices aren’t anything like it. While the members of Insane Clown Posse, the band which inspired a lot of Gamzee’s behaviours, are both white, rap is a strongly black-associated musical style, and Gamzee is later shown to be interested in rapping. Stereotypical juggalos are white, but culture considers them to be worthy of mockery because they’re white people behaving in ways associated with black people. Add in his absent male guardian, drug use, and acting “trashy” when he’s one of the richest trolls, and this all adds up to a very clear mental image of him as a not-very-flattering portrayal of a black person. Coding a nonhuman character strongly with a human racial group isn’t a problem in itself, but when it comes off as supposed to be funny, it’s not exactly SU Garnet levels of good representation, is it? The fact that Hussie, prior to Homestuck, was known for drawing some incredibly racist comics (also including rape, abortion, and drug jokes, so be warned) doesn’t help; we won’t add points for those because we’re judging HS on its own merits and it’s possible for people to change and regret prior prejudices, but it sheds new light on things that’ll come up.

Individual CP points for his language, his hair, his voodoo association, his rapping, his Disappeared Dad, his drug use, and his being coded as poor despite not being so, I think. None of these would be bad on their own or portrayed as less “look at how funny/creepy this guy is”, but...

CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 26

BRIGHT: The first time I read Homestuck, I didn’t realise that Gamzee was meant to be disliked until somewhere in the middle of Act 6. I thought his situation was sad, but Gamzee himself seemed pretty nice, if dopey and not terribly motivated. I still quite like him. Did anyone else find something similar?

CHEL: Yeah, me. I thought he was pretty adorable.

FAILURE ARTIST: Gamzee suffers from abuse in the form of neglect. Though his guardian is arguably not quite responsible, it’s still abuse. As a result, Gamzee eats a dangerous substance and it’s probably why he lets people walk all over him. This is more obviously bad than Dave’s homelife. Yet it’s not ever dealt with and is even mocked. Hussie says in the annotation for this scene that there weren’t actually hostile seadwellers and Gamzee’s guardian just said that to keep Gamzee inside because he was ashamed of him. We find out later that seadwellers ARE hostile. This bit about Gamzee being gaslit is probably a joke then about how embarrassing Gamzee is. Yet isn’t it abusive to make up threats to your children to keep them isolated? Lots of fans consider Gamzee embarrassing too and so don’t see anything in this.

BRIGHT: Not to mention that it’s pretty fucked up to say Gamzee deserves abuse for being embarrassing, when that neglect and abuse is the reason he acts the way he does in the first place!

ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 19 CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 30

CHEL: One CP for the “humorous” drug use and another each for the “joke” gaslighting and neglect, and another for the illogical justification. Wow, that count’s really starting to spike already! And I think now might be a good time to introduce another count…

IN HATE WITH MY CREATION: 1

This will be used whenever the author is clearly showing a lack of respect to the characters or situations that he himself created, in this case by setting up an abusive situation and mocking it when we’re supposed to have sympathy for another abuse sufferer.

BRIGHT: Depressingly, it gets worse later. Significantly worse.

CHEL: Not to mention, if Gamzee’s supposed to stay inside and his guardian’s absent all the time, and trolls “don’t get mail”, how does he feed himself? Even with the sopor, where does that come from? Is it just secreted by the pod or what? Does the pod need to eat? We’re never told. In Hiveswap, the sequel game, we do see that trolls can receive packages, but I would class packages under “mail”, so saying trolls don’t have it is needlessly confusing.

We cut back to Karkat, doing some coding which I’m sure would be very amusing if I knew the first thing about coding. Apparently the biggest problem with ~ATH is the near-impossibility of terminating its infinite loops.

What many ~ATH coders do is import finite constructs and bind the loops to their lifespan. For instance the main loop here will terminate on the death of the universe, labeled U. That way you only have to wait billions of years for it to end instead of forever. You have bound a subloop to the lifespan of the code's author, which is you. Any routine at the end will execute when you die.

So apparently coding is literally magic in this ‘verse? This is backed up by a code sent by TA:

This code, when executed, immediately causes the user's computer to explode, and places a curse on the user forever, along with everyone he knows, and everyone he'll ever meet. Not surprisingly, later on you would run this code in a fit of stupidity.

FAILURE ARTIST: The Internet is magic, why not programming?

BRIGHT: I think the coding is a pretty nifty thematic fit with the whole concept of SBURB! If you’ve got a video game that can affect reality, it’s reasonable to extrapolate that coding can do something similar, even if only by piggybacking off the Game’s infrastructure. And once they get into the Medium, it makes even more sense.

CHEL: True! In the meantime, TA trolls Karkat. Karkat’s speech pattern is remarkably similar to Dave’s, except infinitesimally less wordy and much angrier.

TA: KK dont fliip your 2hiit about thii2 but iim 2ettiing you up two play a game wiith 2ome people. CG: WHY WOULD I FLIP MY SHIT ABOUT THAT. TA: becau2e you fliip your 2hiit about everythiing. CG: WELL WILL YOU LOOK AT THIS. CG: HERE IS MY SHIT, AND YET IT REMAINS UNFLIPPED.

*snerk*

CG: JUST SITTING THERE ON THE SKILLET, GETTING BURNED ON ONE SIDE. CG: IT'S A MIRACLE. TA: oh no are you iinto miiracle2 now two becau2e iif you are youre fiired preemptiively from the game. CG: FUCK NO. TA: ok niice. CG: MIRACLES ARE LIKE POOP STAINS ON GOD'S UNDERWEAR. TA: eheheh makiing fun of people2 reliigiion2 i2 the be2t thiing two do. CG: THAT'S WHY HE HIDES THEM, THEY'RE FUCKING EMBARRASSING. CG: GOD LAUNDERS IN MYSTERIOUS WAYS.

Very Judeo-Christian concept of God for an alien species.

WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 22

FAILURE ARTIST: There’s seemingly no other troll religion but Gamzee’s cult and that has dual gods, not monotheism.

CHEL: Anyway, TA is setting up a game of SBurb, or SGRUB as the trolls call it, which he made from 2ome crazy technology AA dug out of 2ome ruiin2. Karkat hasn’t been told about this by AA, whom he deems “SO SPOOKY”, and whose full handle seen in the chat roll is apocalypseArisen - spooky indeed and thematically appropriate. Mention is made of TA’s WEIRD MUTANT BRAIN; exactly what this means isn’t described yet except that it doesn’t mean he can read Karkat’s mind. TA refuses to elaborate on what he’s discussing with AA on the grounds that it’s private, and this leads into an insult-exchanging session.

TA: nobody hate2 hiim2elf more than you iidiiot. CG: YEAH WELL I HATE YOU WAY MORE THAN I HATE MYSELF, AND THAT'S FUCKING SAYING SOMETHING. CG: IN FACT I HATE YOU MORE THAN I HATE MYSELF AND YOU HATE YOURSELF AND YOU HATE ME COMBINED.

Karkat calls a timeout long enough for TA to explain how they’re playing the game; he intends there to be two teams, Red and Blue, 2o that there2 a better chance of at lea2t one group wiinniing. Karkat agrees this sounds sensible, but flies off the handle on finding out that TA and GC are the team leaders, not him. Karkat spews insults and accusations of cheating, while TA snipes back. This is presumably the moment depicted in this page’s art, in which Karkat yells angrily and flails wildly at his keyboard.

CG: HOW DO YOU GET OUT OF YOUR COCOON IN THE MORNING KNOWING YOU'RE THE WORST THING A UNIVERSE WAS EVER RESPONSIBLE FOR? CG: ALSO IT MUST BE HARD WITH YOUR HANDS TO PERSISTENTLY BOTHERING EVERY MUTATED SET OF GENITALS PEPPERING THAT GHASTLY HUSK YOU PAWN OFF AS A BODY. CG: HAS A FEMALE EVER LOOKED AT YOU WITHOUT AT ONCE TURNING SKYWARD AND ERUPTING LIKE A VOMIT VOLCANO, ANSWER ME THAT.

As later pointed out, trolls reproduce bisexually, so why he specified females here is odd. There is a fan theory I’ve seen that TA is straight, as he’s only seen with female partners and rejects a possible male one, but Karkat demonstrates in a later conversation that he has no concept of gender preference, so if TA is, Karkat doesn’t know that. I guess he could mean that he himself has looked at TA without becoming a vomit volcano, but I doubt that was what Hussie was thinking since it isn’t clear if they’ve ever actually met face to face.

WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 23

Anyway, TA tells Karkat that he’s laughing at Karkat’s immaturity, and that if he really wants to be Red Team leader, he should talk to GC.

CG: I GUESS THESE CONVERSATIONS WE HAVE DO GET KIND OF EMBARRASSING IN RETROSPECT. CG: ARE WE NOT FRIENDS ANYMORE BECAUSE OF STUFF I SAID. TA: eheheheh you LIITERALLY a2k me that every tiime are you jokiing. TA: ii cant even tell anymore.

Okay, that’s adorable. But anyway, after seeing their conversations, you can see what we mean when we say it’s apparently normal for trolls to say horrible things to each other, so why fans and Hussie himself single out some instances and not others is stupid.

ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 20

FAILURE ARTIST: It’s another example that trolls do have friendship, though possibly not the same way humans do.

Also, though he’s not doing it to her face, Karkat is insulting GC’s blindness. Which is not just problematic but also silly given that her blindness is a super-power.

CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 31

After a quick panel where Karkat worries about an encounter with a “CRABBY” someone downstairs, we cut to GC. She is in a very colorful room, unlike Karkat’s grey one, and surrounded by stuffed dragon toys. On her wall is graffiti of a dragon and disturbingly a noose. Photorealistic books are piled on her desk. She’s introduced and we finally get her name: TEREZI PYROPE.

Terezi is the word for “Libra” in multiple languages, but it also might be a reference to the gender-bending blind prophet Tiresias. Pyrope is a type of red garnet and she does love red a lot.

Terezi lives alone deep in the woods (which does raise the question of how she gets all her stuff in a mail-free planet). She loves dragons, including the plushie series called SCALEMATES.

CHEL: Her walls are also decorated in the scales of dragons, which actually do exist on Alternia. Libra. Scales. Geddit?

FAILURE ARTIST: She likes roleplaying and once did a more extreme type until she had an accident that’s not explained at the time. Her big interest and motivation is JUSTICE and she wants to be a LEGISLACERATOR when she grows up. She doesn’t need TROLLBRAILLE (does such a thing exist?)...

WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 24

... since as we know she has special powers. Alternian law is called BRUTAL and indeed it’s so terrible I have to side-eye Terezi for loving it.

CHEL: She claims to love JUSTICE, but Alternian law has very little to do with justice of any kind, as we see when she decides to start roleplaying it with her toys.

On Alternia, there is no such thing as a defense attorney, or a defense. In a courtblock, the word defense itself is offensive.

Not to mention the judge, a chalk depiction of whom adorns her wall, is known as HIS HONORABLE TYRANNY.

Also, do thirteen-year-olds regularly roleplay with their plush toys? I guess ones who are isolated from all actual life forms they could play with instead might.

FAILURE ARTIST: Terezi’s scenario this time is the trial of SENATOR LEMONSNOUT, played by a yellow scalemate. Given that Alternia seems to be an absolute monarchy, I wonder where she gets the concept of senators.

WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 25

Terezi stares down the yellow plush toy before she starts slapping it. She fantasizes about the toy crying tears. The yellow plush toy’s crime is embezzlement, using a currency called imperial beetles. Whether this is a real currency or something Terezi made up we don’t know.

CHEL: As we see later, she’s using a bag of literal beetles in the game. Not sure if they are currency, if she went and caught them, or if trolls can buy them in bags.

FAILURE ARTIST: If you are reading this comic sometime post-2015, there’s two choices. One of them is [???????] Ignore that choice. It becomes relevant only much later. For now, we go to Terezi calling a witness.

Unfortunately, said-witness is a green plush who has been stabbed by a photo-realistic dagger. Apparently, defense attorneys are verboten but murdering witnesses is expected. Alternian justice, everyone.

BRIGHT: It might be moderately less batshit if we assume that Terezi’s obtained all her legal knowledge from TV, movies, and books, and this is a dramatic embellishment rather than the way Alternian trials actually function. She does live on her own in the middle of a forest, after all.

On the other hand, this planet is inhabited solely by children, the over-the-top cruelty is entirely in keeping with Alternia so far, and I don’t think we ever see any of it contradicted.

FAILURE ARTIST: Terezi finds a bag of beetles and that’s all that’s needed to sentence the “criminal”. Her method is to flip a coin called a caegar that has two-heads on it, one of them with a cut on it. The narration says this is like Two-Face from the Batman comics and the villain of the movie No Country for Old Men, though those media don’t exist in the troll universe. Still, trolls have the same trope. She flips the coin and though the result is favorable to Lemonsnout, Terezi declares she can’t see the coin because

SHE'S BLIND, REMEMBER?

She “kills” the stuffed toy by hanging it, like she’s done with many of her stuffed toys. We see now she lives in a tree house (or hive) in a blue and purple forest.

CHEL: In most media, a character being set up like this would be a villain or set up for a heel-face turn, or at least a massive source of conflict over the differing moralities of the different societies. We’ll see if anything ever comes of that.

FAILURE ARTIST: She finishes up by licking her chalk portrait of His Honorable Tyranny. Weird kid.

She gets her weapon (a photo-realistic cane as used by real-life people with vision impairment) and gets down to recruiting members for her team. Her first target is AC, short for arsenicCatnip, who appears as a speech bubble with the Leo sign in olive. The narration says Terezi likes to roleplay with AC, but only facetiously. Terezi and AC roleplay as a DRAGONYY'YYD and some type of big cat. Terezi tries to eat AC’s cub but AC bribes her with an animal called a BULL CHOL3RB34R.

CHEL: AC types with a symbol like this at the front :33 < and with a heavy spurrinkling of cat puns. From what she says about her character, the type of cat in question has two mouths, and it’s later stated that :33 is in fact supposed to be a cat face, one mouth atop the other. The evolutionary or indeed anatomical usefulness of this feature is unclear. Perhaps it’s so they can bite down on prey and vocalise to communicate at the same time? That would be more useful for a pack hunter… Anyway.

FAILURE ARTIST: That done, Terezi asks AC to play a game and has to clarify she means outside of the game they are already playing. AC is interested but she says she has to get purrmission from a certain guy. Terezi thinks it’s ridiculous AC is scared of him because she kills big animals with her bare hands and lives far away from him. AC knows it’s ridiculous but she still wants to get permission. The relationship looks bad now but we later find out it’s part of troll society and it’s odd that Terezi thinks AC is motivated by fear. Anyway, AC says she’ll ask the guy and the conversation ends on that.

CHEL: I don’t know if Hussie either had come up with the relationship system or even decided if those two were going to have a relationship at this point. If he did, he might not have meant them to be in that relationship yet at this point, they could have started it later. It’s not really clear. Not a problem, though, serial writing develops that way sometimes.

FAILURE ARTIST: Terezi trolls Gamzee but thankfully it cuts off before we have to re-read the entire conversation. Next, Terezi has to deal with Karkat. She doesn’t want to ask him to play except as a last resort.

However, Karkat trolls Terezi to tell her he’s the leader of the Red Team now. Terezi doesn’t care though since she just wants to play the game. Karkat says she’ll be second-in-command but Terezi’s sarcastic reply turns him off the idea. The two insult each other and Terezi mock-flirts with Karkat.

GC: 4NYTH1NG TO G3T YOU TO STOP B31NG SUCH 4 B4BY CG: WHAT'S A BABY. GC: OH GC: 1TS L1K3 4 MYTH1C4L L1TTL3 P1NK MONK3Y

CHEL: Once again, babies only come in Caucasian, apparently. Also, doesn't the word "baby" apply as an adjective to non-human species all the time?

WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 26

FAILURE ARTIST: We find out that Terezi is not supposed to have a LUSUS and if she did, the world would come to an end. Karkat is also confused by this statement. Karkat blames the trees for her weirdness and offers to move her into one of his neighbor’s hives. One of his neighbors has been CULLED (killed) and Karkat is blase about this. Terezi turns down his offer. Karkat excuses himself to DEAL WITH THIS GRUMPY CUSTOMER.

We cut to a little later. Karkat’s hive is covered in colorful paint and in the middle of a lake of red. This is the LAND OF PULSE AND HAZE and Karkat is the KNIGHT OF BLOOD. Karkat now has the weapon HOMES SMELL YOU LATER, a sickle in 90s colors. He trolls Terezi and complains about how she wrecked his home. Another running gag: girls ruining boy’s homes. He says she messed with his LOAD GAPER. Terezi (and us) call that a toilet. Toilet is blue blooded vernacular. Later on, highbloods use the term load gaper so I guess Hussie forgot this interesting world-building. Karkat is also upset by the paint job that wasted lots of grist. Terezi calls his fighting adorable and Karkat says it’s ADORABLOODTHIRSTY. He wants to be the next one to connect to a client and she says it doesn’t work that way. It’s only at the end he brings someone in. The priority now is to save her from the meteors by getting her in the game. Karkat hadn’t heard of the meteors until now and is very alarmed. Terezi tells Karkat to talk to apocalypseArisen, twinArmageddons, AG, or CT. There’s a conspiracy going on with those four people. With that, Terezi says she’s got to go.

CHEL: Also, an important point comes up in that conversation; Terezi demands to know what colour Karkat’s blood is, and he refuses to tell her. In case you haven’t picked it up by now, troll society is in fact supposed to be stratified by the colour of their blood. Literal blue blood is towards the higher end of the rankings; Terezi’s on the greener end of blue, so securely middle class. Karkat types in and wears grey, which is not a natural troll blood colour, and the other trolls consider this weird and suspicious. Looking at the list of names on Trollian, we see they range through the rainbow, except for some reason the greens, blues, and purples are split into several layers. I was confused by this at first; I knew he needed twelve colours instead of seven, but it seemed weird that they weren’t more spread out. Then again, social stratification does get a lot stricter up at the top. I thought perhaps the reds, browns, and yellows also come in other shades but just get lumped together because they’re peasants and no one cares? It’s not discussed in canon, but someone actually does have an explanation for it; it’s what you get when the RGB and CMYK colour wheels overlap.

A little while ago, a spooky-looking young troll lady with glowing white eyes and a maroon Aries shirt sign - this being the colour of apocalypseArisen, so this is presumably her - hovers over a frog-topped temple extremely similar to the one on Jade’s island. With a wave of her hand, the frog’s head breaks off and crashes to the ground.

You're not sure why you did that, really. There'll probably turn out to be a reason. There's a reason for everything. Understanding this lets you be reckless.

Somewhere else, Gamzee’s Faygo bottle, now photorealistic, lands at the feet of a mysterious someone who is wearing striped pants and what appear to be blue and purple bowling shoes, of all things. This person complains about Rubbish from the LAND DWELLERS and picks up the bottle with a hand wearing a purple ring emblazoned with an Aquarius symbol; the name in that colour text in the chat, should the reader go back to check, is caligulasAquarium.

FAILURE ARTIST: How fucked up was troll Caligula? Maybe he just broke troll taboos.

CHEL: The implication of him having an aquarium is making me picture Troy McClure.

We go back to Karkat’s hive and rewind a little, to see him deal with the earlier-mentioned crabby customer…

And we need to provide the text from this page in its entirety so we can discuss it.

FAILURE ARTIST: If you want to know why Homestucks go so crazy over buckets, read this and weep!

You go downstairs and confront your custodian, which is another term for a frightening beast known as a LUSUS NATURAE. Your lusus has looked after you since you were very young in lieu of any biological parents, whom you have never known. No young troll ever knows his or her blood parents, nor could such lineage ever be accurately traced. Adult trolls supply their genetic material to the FILIAL PAILS carried by imperial drones and offered to the monstrous MOTHER GRUB deep underground in the brooding caverns. She then combines all the genetic material into one diabolical incestuous slurry, and lays hundreds of thousands of eggs at once. The eggs hatch into young larval trolls which wriggle about to locate a cozy stalactite from which to spin their cocoons. After they pupate, the young troll with his or her newfound limbs undergoes a series of dangerous trials. If they survive, they are chosen by a member of the diverse and terrifying subterranean monster population native to Alternia. This creature becomes the troll's lusus, and together they surface and choose a location to build a hive. The building process is facilitated by CARPENTER DROIDS left on the planet to cater to the young. But only for building. They're on their own otherwise. The vast majority of adult trolls are off-planet, serving some role in the forces of ongoing imperial conquest, besieging other star systems in the name of Alternian glory. The culture and civilization on the homeworld is maintained almost entirely by the young. Trolls sure are weird!

CHEL: “Lusus naturae”, to start with, is Latin for “freak of nature”. Probably it means something else in Alternian.

FAILURE ARTIST: The lusus system is so bizarre. How long have they been using it? When we see what could be called a Bizarro Alternia, they also have lusus, so it’s not just because adults can’t raise children.

CHEL: Naturally-evolved symbiosis and parasitism are hardly unknown among animals on Earth, though no real ones really work like this. The closest I can think of among vertebrates are cuckoos and similar birds, where the egg is laid in another species’ nest and the hatchling kills or starves out the original offspring. This isn’t what’s happening here, as the lusus doesn’t have offspring of its own and wouldn’t appear to have any particular reason to let a young troll latch onto it, not to mention young trolls presumably look nothing like the offspring of a creature like that, and lususes/lusi (I don’t think there’s an officially accepted plural? The fandom latched onto the very non-Latin but suitably alien “lusii”) come in wildly varying species, so it’s not a case of a specific two-species symbiotic bond like clownfish and anemones. However, trolls do have psychic powers, so it could always be handwaved with a form of mental link.

BRIGHT: Bizarre as it is, the lusus system is nicely alien! I think that in this case, the lack of explanation actually works in its favour -- there’s nothing to point to and say ‘but that explanation doesn’t make sense’. I do like a good explanation, but in the case of background worldbuilding I think it’s fine to chuck something in and move on.

Also, we now discover that Jade had a perfectly normal childhood by troll standards. (Er, minus the murderous neighbours.)

FAILURE ARTIST: The narration says the “vast majority” of adult trolls are off-planet. This implies some small percentage of adults are on-planet. In the spin-off series Hiveswap Friendsim, there are characters on Alternia who get into, well, adult situations. The writers on Twitter clarified that there are trolls who are over eighteen Earth years but under the age of expulsion on Alternia. In one game, there’s adults who should be off-planet but aren’t, though how many trolls risk that is unknown.

CHEL: The age of majority in numerous Earth cultures is or has been twenty or twenty-one, so that’s probably what the writers were going for. Or, of course, just trying to avoid backlash from the Tumblr anti-shipping population. There are also cases where adults really should be on-planet but don’t appear to be, but we’ll get to that in the Friendsims.

I have to say I’m rather concerned by what appears to be a serious bottleneck in the reproduction system. According to everything we see, there is only one Mother Grub for the whole planet. What happens if something happens to her? Replacements are bred in the same way as queen bees or ants, but destroying the cavern where she resides would put a major crimp in troll society for a long time even if there was a replacement around. With ants and bees, there is generally more than one hive per species.

BRIGHT: We do meet one Virgin Mother Grub later on, and she’s acting as a lusus. I always assumed that there were at least a few around, otherwise having one potential backup breeder taken out of the pool should have raised a lot more fuss than it apparently did.

Moreover, while the Brooding Caverns aren’t described in Homestuck, they are described in Friendsim, and it is literally a single giant cave with the Mother Grub in the middle, surrounded by grubs, young trolls, and lusii. In one of the game routes, the Mother Grub is in fact injured by a distressed lusus, which would be easily prevented by having her in a separate room. There are apparently no barriers to an outsider just wandering in, and given that this is Alternia, said outsider could probably do quite a lot of damage if they so chose.

CHEL: Particularly since most lusii are extremely dangerous, and there are a hell of a lot of them there. It’s also been brought up in the Tumblr parts of fandom that it would be incredibly easy to rebel against the dystopian regime by taking the Mother Grub hostage or destroying/damaging the caverns.

FAILURE ARTIST: Karkat fights his lusus like the human kids fought theirs, but without a cool animation. It’s just a gif and a link to a 38 second tune. You’ll notice in the background on the fridge there’s a crude drawing of the crabby creature: a callback to John’s drawing.

We cut to TA, the troll we saw earlier get bonked by a key. TA has his glasses off and under them are a red eye and a blue eye. He puts them on dramatically in a reference to the CSI: Miami meme everyone has forgotten. After a long Dave-like block of text describing how this dude is cool but not cool, it turns out we won’t be introduced to him.

Cut to a troll with a green Leo sign on her shirt and horns that look a lot like cat ears. She looks cute but there’s blood on her walls. The narration is unnerved by her so we go back to TA.

TA’s name is SOLLUX CAPTOR.

CHEL: The name is taken from the mythological twins of the Gemini constellation, Pollux and Castor. The combination of sol-lux could also be read to mean “sunlight”.

FAILURE ARTIST: Behind him is what looks like a computer mainframe but covered in a yellow substance. On the wall, there’s red-and-blue writing. His recuperacoon has two openings, though it’s never even brought up why.

You are apeshit bananas at computers, and you know ALL THE CODES. All of them. You are the unchallenged authority on APICULTURE NETWORKING. And though all your friends recognize your unparalleled achievements as a TOTALLY SICK HACKER, you feel like you could be better. It's one of a number of things you SORT OF BEAT YOURSELF UP ABOUT for NO VERY GOOD REASON during sporadic and debilitating BIPOLAR MOOD SWINGS. You have a penchant for BIFURCATION, in logic and in life. Your mutant mind is hounded by the psychic screams of the IMMINENTLY DECEASED. Your visions foretell of the planet's looming annihilation, and yet unlike the typical sightless prophet of doom, you are gifted with VISION TWOFOLD.

I used to think “imminently deceased” meant “recently deceased” and not “going to be deceased”. Either way, it’s really a Blessed With Suck power.

Lots has been made of Sollux’s BIPOLAR MOOD SWINGS but I don’t think Hussie was seriously thinking of bipolar depression. Still makes for good fanfiction.

CHEL: Please don't use "bipolar" to just mean moody, Hussie.

CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 32 You have developed a new game, adapted via CODE PARSED FROM THE RUNES AND GLYPHS IN AN ANCIENT UNDERGROUND TEMPLE. You believe this game to be THE SALVATION OF YOUR RACE, though you are not sure how yet. To ensure success, you will distribute the game to two teams of friends, a RED TEAM and a BLUE TEAM. You will lead the latter group.

One guess what this game is. We also see “friends” being used in the normal human sense.

WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 27

The prompter tells Sollux to equip ninja stars, but it turns out he has psionic powers that allow him to move objects with a purple aura. However, in moving the ninja stars, he messes up and slices the BEEHOUSE MAINFRAMES. Little purple bees buzz around him and send him messages in beenary code. The prompter tells Sollux to taste the honey but he refuses.

You do not under any circumstance eat the MIND HONEY. The consequences are highly unpleasant.

Remember that. The mind honey is only supposed to be a soporific for his lusus.

Sollux snaps his fingers (spelling out 2NAP in his quirk) and the bees fall asleep.

CHEL: I only just noticed the “2nap” = “to nap” pun.

BRIGHT: Also, while Sollux does have psychic powers, those powers are not related to animal control. So this is a little strange.

FAILURE ARTIST: Sollux goes to his computer while stepping over video games, which in this world are colorful grubs. He first talks with Terezi. She knows about his game to save the world and immediately picks the Red Team. He wonders how she knew there would be a red team but she says it’s easy to guess he would make a red team and a blue team. This observation annoys him and he goes on a rant.

TA: maybe iim more of an aubergiine guy plu2 whatever that putriid color is you type wiith, what ii2 that, turqoii2e?

I have a headcanon he can only see red and blue and that’s why he doesn’t know what color Terezi types in. Considering his society is based on color this would be quite a disability.

CHEL: I’ve also seen headcanons he’s colourblind and struggles to remember which colours go where on the hemospectrum, as at one point he complains about how yellow is the lowest on the totem pole apart from something he can’t remember, while talking to someone who’s lower. (It’s actually third from the bottom.)

FAILURE ARTIST: They then talk about how this game will save the world. He isn’t sure how but he says AA can back him up on this. Terezi thinks he’s right...mostly. He says before this is done he will die twice and go blind, but he figures that’s what happens to a prophet of doom. He compares this to an angel getting its wings and we find out trolls consider angels to be feathery demons. Terezi wonders if this doom-and-gloom isn’t just part of his brain problems. He is offended by this reasoning and compares it to clown pieing, which in retrospect is scarier on Alternia than on Earth. He tells her to talk to AA and Terezi says AA hasn’t been the same lately. Sollux and Terezi say they’ll take the game seriously but they also goof around about it.

We cut back to the spooky troll from before. She kicks the frog statue so hard it all breaks off.

The prompter tells Sollux to deal with apocalypseArisen, the spooky troll we just saw. AA asks Sollux if he set up the teams, but without a question mark. He says he’s working on it. He asks if she’ll be happy to get out and leave the voiice2 behind. He says it would suck to have them stay until death, a statement which will become very ironic. AA says she’s 0k with a l0t 0f things...including their failure masquerading as victory. Sollux is angry at her pessimism. He gets more angry when he finds out the game will actually wipe out their people. He says he refuses to be team leader, but she says he was never going to be that. He threatens her with psionics and says he could do things that would make [her] head 2piin liike dervii2h iin a fuckiing blender which makes me wonder how trolls have Sufism.

CHEL: How many humans know where the term comes from? I could buy it as Translation Convention regarding, say, a clown cult thing, although everything seems to imply the trolls are speaking “English”. Still, the idiom comes from human Western culture, so...

WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 28

FAILURE ARTIST: She says she’s coming up, which only confuses Sollux.

He goes and tells Terezi and then Karkat that the Game has been aborted. Terezi is confused but doesn’t say much. Karkat accuses Sollux of trying to kick him out. Karkat declares the friendship cancelled, showing again trolls have friends. Karkat insults Sollux’s programming skills and threatens to run ~ATH. Sollux tells him not to be Karkat doesn’t listen.

TA: KK DO NOT RUN THAT CODE. TA: hello?????????????? carcinoGeneticist's [CG'S] computer exploded. TA: oh my god.

That is some amazing chat program.

The explosion kills Crabdad. Turns out that code causes the death of ALL of Karkat’s friend’s lusii. Each lusus gets prototyped, which seems heartwarming but turns out very bad for their session. We see Gamzee mourning his Goatdad’s death by harpooning in a moment that’s very sad, even considering how terrible a parent Goatdad is.

CHEL: And here I want to go back to Gamzee for a bit. The commentary, as we mentioned, says that Goatdad “told” him to stay indoors and was ashamed of him. However, in the actual comic, everything is set up to show the lusii as being non-sapient, i.e. not able to talk to their charges and not in possession of a concept of shame. They behave like regular animals, Sollux says his is dumb enough to walk right off the roof if not tethered, and the trolls go on repeatedly about how happy they are to have prototyped their lusii because now they can actually communicate verbally with them for the first time, as Rose did with Jaspers. This is similarly inconsistent in the later-written Pesterquest games, which we’ll get to eventually. So either Hussie forgot that lusii aren’t the same as parents…

WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 29

… or he claimed they were sapient when they weren’t before, solely to use them to bash Gamzee.

IN HATE WITH MY CREATION: 2

FAILURE ARTIST: Back to Sollux. He tries deleting all his computer viruses, but there’s one he can’t delete. It has a flashing billiard ball next to execute. It’s set to go off after the universe ends and even Sollux doesn’t know what it does. The narrator does know.

When executed, the subprogram will summon an indestructible demon into the recently voided universe. This monstrous being with the power to travel through time is inconvenienced very little by his arrival upon THE GREAT UNDOING. He has the entire cadaver of the expired universe to pick apart at his whim. From its birth through its swelling maturity and tapering decay. In a reality he is known to have marked for predation, he will go about assembling followers through various epochs, even going as far as personally establishing the parameters for his future summoning. Sollux couldn't know that the virus is essentially a formality. The demon is already here.

Sollux hears grumbling noises coming from the ceiling. His lusus, a BICYCLOPS, is kept chained to the roof of his COMMUNAL HIVE STEM and regularly fed and fought.

CHEL: A bicyclops, later also referred to as a biclops, is a roughly humanoid being with two heads, each with one big eyeball. A hivestem is basically a block of flats, made out of a giant hexagonal tube-like structure with small grey hive-homes built into the sides. I can’t tell if it’s supposed to be the literal stem of some kind of gigantic plant or not. Pretty cool if it is.

FAILURE ARTIST: In the night sky, there’s a few meteors. Turns out AA is floating outside.

We cut to GA wielding a chainsaw while riding a moth-like lusus against a colorful background. She lives in the middle of the desert in a home like Jade’s. However, we aren’t introduced to her.

BRIGHT: There are giant colourful sails attached to the towers. I’m not sure how practical that is, but it has definite flair.

FAILURE ARTIST: Instead, we are introduced to AT. His name is TAVROS NITRAM. He turns out to be a wheelchair user. I think this was ascended fanon based on his love of flying. How well Homestuck treats this disabled character we’ll see. His lusus is a little bull with wings. He’s surrounded by playing cards, stuffed animals, and posters of fairies. A lance is leaned against his wall.

CHEL: “Tavros” obviously derives from Taurus, and might also be from Davros, a wheelchair-using Doctor Who villain. Nitram is “Martin” backwards, which according to the wiki might be connected to Mary Martin, an actress who played Peter Pan, or Martin McGuinness, an Irish politician whose planned prosecution was codenamed Operation Taurus. It might also derive from nitrate, which causes “brown blood disease” in fish.

You are known to be heavily arrested by FAIRY TALES AND FANTASY STORIES. You have an acute ability to COMMUNE WITH THE MANY CREATURES OF ALTERNIA, a skill you have utilized to CAPTURE AND TRAIN a great many. They are all your friends, as well as your warriors, which you pit in battle through a variety of related CARD AND ROLE PLAYING GAMES. You used to engage in various forms of MORE EXTREME ROLEPLAYING with some of your other friends before you had an accident. You like to engage in the noble practice of ALTERNIAN SLAM POETRY, possibly the oldest, most revered, and certainly freshest artform in your planet's rich history. You have a profound fascination with the concept of FLIGHT, and all lore surrounding the topic. You believe in FAIRIES, even though they AREN'T REAL.

The name of his lusus may be ascended fanon too, if I’m remembering correctly. Its name, mentioned later, is Tinkerbull, and it’s the cutest thing ever I want a million of them.

Tavros is prompted to Cut to the chase and play card games immediately, and picks a Pokemon ripoff called FIDUSPAWN. He deals himself a favourable hand and lobs an OOGONIBOMB, a jelly-looking blob, at the HOST PLUSH. The Oogonibomb hatches into a terrifying face-hugger-like monster, which latches onto the plush, then scuttles out of the way in time for a larger monster to explode out of said plush.

BRIGHT: Alternian card games sure are something!

HORSARONI, I CHOOSE YOU!!!!!!

CHEL: Horsaroni devours the fidusucker face-hugger in preparation for battle, and Tavros uses his awesome bestial communion abilities [to] bend the ferocious stallion to [his] whim while Tinkerbull looks on nervously. Tavros succeeds in getting the beast under control, and… gets it and Tinkerbull to take a nap together. Everybody wins.

FAILURE ARTIST: He plans on making Horsaroni have sex in the future. Whoa boy.

CHEL: The prompt tells Tavros to roll up the ramp which leads to the top of his rather high recuperacoon, and to hop in, which he does, followed by much reasonable complaining about how it’ll take an hour for him to change his clothes, plus the four-wheel device rolls back down the ramp without him. Also, it’s noted that his horns make it impossible to get fully inside the cocoon, which makes it hard to get any solid shuteye. So, wait, trolls can breathe while fully submerged in the slime? There’s no elaboration as of yet, but it’s possible Hiveswap will discuss that.

FAILURE ARTIST: This slapstick with a disabled character is unfortunate. Terezi never had to deal with this bullshit.

CHEL: Not to this extent, anyway.

CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 33

After much cleanup which we thankfully don’t have to read through, he gets back in his chair and picks up his JOUSTING LANCE.

FAILURE ARTIST: We get a look outside of Tavros’ hive as he thinks about his future plans. He lives in a windmill by a cliff and in his yard he has a practice dummy with...is that a pail???

CHEL: Considering trolls’ opinions of pails, I hope it’s a trashcan, but the bucket thing might be a retcon for the sake of humour.

FAILURE ARTIST: Anyway, he hopes to be a CAVALREAPER when he grows up, if he isn’t culled (aka murdered) for his disability. Rather optimistic of him to think there’s a chance he won’t be culled. I think this is when we first find out about Alternian eugenics. Odd that it didn’t come up when we were introduced to Terezi.

BRIGHT: Terezi’s disability doesn’t really impact her ability to function, though. Her smellovision is accurate enough to let her read and she doesn’t have any trouble moving around. Tavros’s disability is clearly an actual disability that hinders him in a lot of ways. Given Alternian society as we’ve seen it so far, Terezi might be fine. Tavros would need assistive measures and that makes him a write-off.

There’s also the matter of personality. Terezi tends to be confident; Tavros generally isn’t. Add in Terezi’s midblood status to Tavros’s lowblood position, and it makes sense for it to come up now.

FAILURE ARTIST: Tavros admires his fairy posters, including one saying “ Pupa Pan” with a silhouette of a winged troll. This is the troll version of Peter Pan and their one also includes “indians”, just they are “weird aliens”.

CHEL: Can’t say I’m too pleased about that, personally.

CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 33

FAILURE ARTIST: I don’t know if Andrew Hussie read Peter Pan but when I read it it felt very Hussie. Anyway, Tavros keeps his bedroom window open for Pupa Pan and splashes SPECIAL STARDUST on his face. The same substance Gamzee uses? Hmmm.

Andrew Hussie takes a jab at the fanon he decided to ascend:

You have had this interest [in flying] far prior to your accident. Being paralyzed isn't what made you want to be able to fly. That would be dumb and would make no sense. Being paralyzed does sort of make you want to be able to walk, though.

CHEL: Uh… haha? Are we supposed to laugh here, or feel bad, or what?

ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?:21

FAILURE ARTIST: We find out in Friendsim that terrestrial flight is verboten, though Hussie probably didn’t think of that until much later.

We cut to the future briefly to see Tavros has robot legs. Because it would be terrible to have a disabled character just remain disabled! /s

CHEL: To be fair, they’re in a world which has the technology to make near-perfect robotic limbs and he wants to be able to walk again. One could argue that having that technology is problematic in terms of it being an easy handwave, but since they have intergalactic spaceships it might seem somewhat weird if they didn’t have robot parts. The existence of prosthetics in a society which kills its disabled as standard is a bit odd, but not impossible if they have whole robots. Though it begs the question where he got the wheelchair.

BRIGHT: Well, it could be that prosthetics aren’t standard, this is just a special situation. He doesn’t get them until after he’s entered the Game, after all.

CHEL: Disturbingly, and perhaps more fittingly for troll society, the legs were fitted after his real ones were removed via chainsaw, apparently sans anaesthetic.

GORE GALORE: 11

BRIGHT: It kind of looks like he got chainsawed through the waist. If that is the case, then a lot of important organs would have been mangled and would need replacing — at least if he was human. We don’t know anything about how troll guts are laid out, but there’s no reason to believe they’re radically different to the human setup.

CHEL: None of the troll gang appear to be medics, either. How is he not dead?

FAILURE ARTIST: The legs were built by an unnamed male character who likes to break as well as make robots.

Occasionally though, he will allow philanthropy to override misanthrobopy.

Misanthrobopy. I didn’t notice that until now.

GA was the one to chainsaw Tavros, with the male character watching in the shadows. That character has the Sagittarius sign and a broken horn. We learn his name later but never how he broke that horn.

BRIGHT: Which is also a point in favour of getting prosthetic limbs being somewhat unusual — Tavros only gets his because an acquaintance with specialised knowledge takes an interest.

FAILURE ARTIST: So, back to the present...of the past. Tavros is being trolled by both Gamzee and someone known as AG. He deals with AG first. With this, we get our first dialogue from Homestuck’s most Homestuck character. AG, or arachnidsGrip, brags about being on the Blue Team and mocks Tavros for being on the team full of 8lind girls and lame 8oys and cranky iiiiiiiim8eciles. Tavros says they’re probably right, but then says he promised someone not to talk to them. This person turns out to be Tavros’ imaginary friend Rufio, the personification of his self-esteem. GA was the one who gave him the advice. While that’s not a bad coping mechanism, he really shouldn’t be telling AG about it. AG complains about GA’s meddling and says GA was just making fun of Tavros with that advice. AG complains about how long it’s taking for the Blue Team to get going. In the end, AG says it will be like old tiiiiiiiimes and gives a winking emoticon.

After that conversation with a frienemy, Tavros raps with his friend-friend Gamzee. Gamzee apologizes for zoning out, but unlike everyone else who talks to him Tavros isn’t angry. Awww…

Tavros shares the good news that they are both on the Red Team, though Tavros says it came from someone he doesn’t want to talk about. Gamzee had already heard and he’s very excited. Tavros does an }:o) emoticon and Gamzee is tickled pink that Tavros “stole his nose”. That might be flirting among trolls. They make plans to “slam” but first Gamzee explains the Game plan. Terezi has connected to Karkat and now Gamzee has to connect to Terezi. However, she’s off in the woods doing something. For now, Gamzee has to get Tavros connected to him. He says something that I’ve seen people point to as a sign he’s bad to the bone.

TC: sO jUsT dOwNlOaD tHiS mOtHeRfUcKeR i'M sEnDiNg YoU sO wE cAn KiCk ThIs BiTcH dOwN tHe StAiRs.

This is probably a callback to Dave getting kicked down the stairs and not a conscious callback on Gamzee’s part. Really, usually when Gamzee says “bitch” it’s just another way of saying “thing”. He’s not kicking anyone down the stairs. Not yet.

Then again, he later says:

TC: JuSt LeT mE sNeAk Up On ThIs BoTtLe Of FaYgO aNd SnAp ItS nEcK lIkE iM a FuCkIn LaUgHsSaSsIn.

So he is a little sinister.

CHEL: Hardly any more so than Terezi the hanging fetishist, though!

BRIGHT: Or the guy who codes viruses that blow up his friends’ computers.

FAILURE ARTIST: After all the foreplay for their rap session, the dialogue ends with:

You both then proceed to have one of the worst rap-offs in the history of paradox space.

Only much later do we see this rap-off. We also find out Gamzee’s feelings towards Tavros. Yet this conversation alone was enough to sail that ship.

We cut to Terezi in a burning woods. This is where we find out what the deal with Terezi’s “family” is. Her lusus is a giant teal egg on an even larger DOOMSDAY SCALE. Inside the egg is a blind dragon. The dragon can communicate telepathically via dreams. It was how Terezi learned to “see” after the accident. This answers some questions while leaving so many unanswered. Like why does Terezi sleep in her street clothes?

CHEL: Balanced on the other side of the scale is a gargantuan skull with troll-like horns and a sort of goat-y shape. We’ll see the kind of creature it comes from later.

FAILURE ARTIST: Terezi dreams of Prospit, and we see it as she “sees” it: gauzy and throbbing.

Her lusus hatches from the heat, but is immediately killed by a meteor. A sympathetic ally puts it in the kernelsprite and that sympathetic ally is clown boy. So put that on his scorecard.

With the egg hatched, the doomsday device displays 6:12. The arc number for this arc.

CHEL: Karkat’s “wriggling day” is 6/12, which actually makes him a Gemini rather than a Cancer. Guess it’s different for trolls.

FAILURE ARTIST: Finally, we are introduced properly to AA. The one with the inconsistent horns.

Your name is ARADIA MEGIDO.

CHEL: “Aradia” is the name of a “messiah” of witchcraft in Charles Godfrey Leland’s “Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches”, effectively a piece of paganism fanon. “Megido” is derived from Mount Meggido, the place from which the word Armageddon is derived and where the final battle of said event will supposedly occur, and a powerful spell in the video game Shin Megami Tensei. It might also be related to “Meido”, 冥途 めいど, the Japanese equivalent of Purgatory, and “meido”, メイド, meaning maidservant, relevant to her low blood status and later her game class.

You once had a number of INTERESTS, which in time you have LOST INTEREST IN. You seem to recollect once having a fondness for ARCHEOLOGY, though now have trouble recalling this passion. It nonetheless has led you to find your PRESENT CALLING, which came through the discovery of these MYSTIC RUINS on which you presently stand, and which you recently DESECRATED OUT OF BOREDOM. Guiding you to this calling were the VOICES OF THE DEAD, which you have been able to hear since you were young. The voices have become louder as THE GREAT UNDOING approaches. This trend in escalation began after an ACCIDENT involving a CERTAIN KIND OF ROLE PLAYING, which might have been another of your interests once upon a time. It doesn't matter much anymore. The accident resulted in the DEATH OF YOUR LUSUS, which prompted you to leave your home and take up these ruins as residence. On the instruction of your ANCESTORS, you have recovered MYSTERIOUS TECHNOLOGY from the ruins, and convinced a friend to adapt it into a GAME THAT WILL BRING ABOUT THE DESTRUCTION OF YOUR CIVILIZATION. And by convinced, you suppose you mean tricked.

CHEL: She chooses to try to take something from her sylladex, but it works on the OUIJA modus, which means she can only take what the spirits allow her to take.

BRIGHT: This has to be the weirdest, most senseless modus yet.

CHEL: They produce a card with the Crosbytop, which she found on a dig a while ago. GA’s trying to contact her.

She's always bugging you. Bugging and fussing and meddling. What's her deal! You guess it's flattering that she wants to talk to you so much though. You're ok with it. You're ok with a lot of things.

She answers, with an “0h n0000000” on seeing GA, who asks if this is “The Night You Blow Everything Up”.

GA: Is There Nothing I Can Do To Change Your Mind AA: n0 AA: 0r yes AA: yes theres n0thing AA: and n0 y0u cant AA: but y0u sh0uldnt pretend as if y0u believe this has anything t0 d0 with the state 0f my mind AA: 0r the decisi0ns it will make 0r has already made GA: Yeah I Guess Not GA: I Thought Id Be Friendly Though GA: And Remind You That You Do In Fact Have A Hand In All The Terrible Things That Are About To Happen GA: Because Thats What Friends Are For GA: And The Fact That What Ensues Will Be Terrible GA: Is An Immutable Fact I Am Stating For The Record GA: And The Fact That We Will Not Be On The Same Team Is Similarly Immutable GA: It Does Not Mean That Teamwork Is What Isnt Taking Place Here AA: s0rry i didnt f0ll0w that GA: Ill Be Here To Help GA: If You Need Me AA: 0k AA: thanks

Honestly, this is giving me shipping ideas which will only make sense once more about trolls has been explained. Pin in that.

BRIGHT: How does GA know it will be terrible?

CHEL: Stay tuned. We’ll find out.

Aradia checks on Sollux and has the conversation we already have seen, which is linked back to instead of copied, thank goodness. Huss seems to have mastered that part of the timeline. Aradia arrives at his hivestem and levitates the Bicyclops, while meteors begin to fall, and AG trolls her. AG is revealed to be female and seen in silhouette; she has a blue Scorpio symbol, one pointed horn, one forked one, and long hair. Remember this character for later.

AG: Do you have Mr. Two Eyes all 8efuddled and flustered in your we8 of lies? AG: Or Mr. Four Eyes? AG: Hmmmmmmmmm. AG: I don't know. Which nickname do you think would 8e suita8ly derogatory in this case Aradia? AA: h0w ab0ut AA: eight eyes AA: minus seven AG: ::::P

FAILURE ARTIST: God, I love Aradia. Though I guess if you’re reading this for the first time you won’t get her jab here until later.

CHEL: Aradia protests that she didn’t trick him. AG says it doesn’t matter, and declares that once the game starts she and Aradia will be the Blue Team co-leaders, only asking afterwards if this is okay with Aradia, who doesn’t care. She tells Aradia she has a present for her, “Just from me. From me alone and no8ody else”, and wants a special team name for just the two of them, which Aradia doesn’t want to bother with.

AG: I just thought it would 8e really fitting. AG: Kind of like a fresh start, you know? AG: I don't know, what are our shared interests? I guess I never really thought a8out this! I guess I'm used to thinking of you as the enemy. There must 8e some overlap in profiles. AG: Come oooooooon, let's 8rainstorm! AA: 0_0 AG: Man, it'll 8e great. We'll 8e unstoppa8le. Surely you must admit it will 8e nice to re8ound from the Team Charge de8acle! AA: i never think ab0ut that anym0re AG: Oh maaaaaaaan, I'm so dum8! Here I am running my mouth and opening up old wounds, while at the very same time trying to make amends! What an idiot.

I hope AG’s fans are not stupid enough to assume she was sincere on that last line, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

FAILURE ARTIST: I think that AG thinks she’s being sincere.

CHEL: She asks if Aradia’s “loser” male friend will be on the Blue Team, which Aradia says he isn’t, calls him dead weight (messing up her own quirk in the process, which would usually be “dead w8”), ignores Aradia’s declaration that she didn’t exclude him, and heads off to “give him a hard time” despite Aradia’s protest. From this we can presume said friend is Tavros.

We see AG’s face in the next page; she has blue makeup, one blackened lens in her spectacles, a cyborg arm, and a nasty grin.

FAILURE ARTIST: It kills me that we can’t just say who she is now. I’m sure she’s broken through cultural osmosis. However, instead of an introduction, we go to Sollux and Aradia.

Sollux apologizes for flying off the handle. He says even though he quit as leader, he’ll still play and do his best. In his self-degradation, he says something very odd.

TA: liike 2ome low cla22 guy wiith... whatever color blood ii2 lower on the hiierarchy than miine. TA: what2 wor2e than yellow? TA: fuck thii2 confu2iing ca2te 2y2tem.

You’d think he’d know by now, especially given how important the hierarchy is supposed to be.

CHEL: Especially since the person he’s talking to is not only lower on the hierarchy than him, but also one of his closest friends and (minor spoiler) possibly his love interest. This is where the “colourblind” theory for him comes from.

FAILURE ARTIST: Aradia tells Sollux to come to the window because she’s outside. He complains that he can’t see her and she tells him to look closer. He does so while grumbling about psychics. Aradia snaps her fingers and he falls asleep...in the dangerous mind honey.

CHEL: How does she do that? I don’t think she has mind control abilities, does she? All I remember is her throwing boulders around… did she Force-choke him into unconsciousness?

BRIGHT: Maybe she did it the same way Sollux knocked his bees out.

FAILURE ARTIST: Cut to much later. Meteors are falling furiously and all the teammates except Sollux are in the Medium. Sollux wakes up but with mind honey in his mouth. We find out what mind honey does to trolls like Sollux: it causes him to do an OPTIC BLAST , destroying the roof of his apartment and killing yet another lusus. Which just raises the question of why he let the mind honey flow on his floor.

Now, we are introduced to my Zodiac troll.

Your name is NEPETA LEIJON.

CHEL: Nepeta is the Latin genus name for catnip, and Leijon is the archaic spelling of “lejon”, the Swedish word for lion. It should be pronounced “lay-on”, but Hussie said “pronounce everything in the least affected manner possible, from an American perspective”, so I’ve always mentally heard it as “lee-jon” or possibly “lay-shawn”.

You live in a CAVE that is also a HIVE, but still mostly just a CAVE. You like to engage in FRIENDLY ROLE PLAYING, but not the DANGEROUS KIND. Never the DANGEROUS KIND. It's TOO DANGEROUS! Too many of your good friends have gotten hurt that way. Your daily routine is dangerous enough as it is. You prowl the wilderness for GREAT BEASTS, and stalk them and take them down with nothing but your SHARP CLAWS AND TEETH! You take them back to your cave and EAT THEM, and from time to time, WEAR THEIR PELTS FOR FUN. You like to paint WALL COMICS using blood and soot and ash, depicting EXCITING TALES FROM THE HUNT! And other goofy stories about you and your numerous pals. Your best pal of all is A LITTLE BOSSY, and people wonder why you even bother with him. But someone has to keep him pacified. If not you, then who? Everyone has an important job to do.

So the dangerous kind of roleplaying is more dangerous than taking down wild beasts.

CHEL: Which is already pretty damn dangerous!

You never know when you might encounter some unsuspecting prey. Or when some prey might encounter an unsuspecting you! On Alternia, everything is considered unsuspecting prey by everything else.

FAILURE ARTIST: Also just noticed her “hive” has windows even though it’s a cave and the windows don’t actually seem to open to anything? We never get to see any of her cave outside of this so who knows how it works.

CHEL: Maybe she painted them on?

Her lusus is a big cat, with the double mouths already mentioned in her roleplaying. I still don’t know what evolutionary purpose this serves. However, her trolltag is arsenicCatnip, and the double mouths are depicted as two threes; arsenic’s atomic number is 33. It’s little references and in-jokes like this that keep me loving HS despite its worst parts. I can’t get enough of these things.

Said cat is named POUNCE DE LEON, a reference to the explorer Juan Ponce de Leon, seeker of the Fountain of Youth.

You and she go on adventures together in search of the FOUNTAIN OF CUTE. You ride your sure-pawed mount into the rugged frontier. And sometimes she rides you when she gets tired, which is frequently. It sure will be sad when she dies. But who knows when or how that will happen. We might not even really have the time to find out! Later there was a cave-in.

Note the cave paintings on her walls, which are in red, black, and pale grey, and large black animal corpses in the foreground. It’s not clear if the animals themselves are black or they’re just in silhouette, but they contrast with the lusii, which are all white. These beasts also bleed mammalian red, which Nepeta uses for paint, while the lusii bleed the same colour as their respective troll charges. What precisely the lusii are and how they’re different from a regular animal is never really made clear. They could be separate species, or they could be regular animals psychically or biologically bonded to a troll and metamorphosing because of that. Or Hussie might not have thought it out that far.

Karkat’s trolling Nepeta on her DRAWING TABLET COMPUTER. She wishes she could adapt it to a fetch modus because her own one is frustrating, and answers him. She has to handwrite what she says on Trollian, and surrounds it with doodles of cats.

AC: :33 < *ac perks up curiously* AC: :33 < *she wiggles her rear end a bit and then chases something she s33s bounce into one of karkats shoes* CG: KARKAT CAN'T BELIEVE HE HAS TO SINK THIS LOW. CG: KARKAT CAN'T BELIEVE HE'S ASKING AN AUTISTIC GIRL IN A CAVE TO JOIN HIS TEAM. CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 34

Thanks, asshole. I’ve seen fans assume this means Nepeta is literally autistic, and she could be, but either way Karkat is clearly using it as an insult here, not a literal description.

Anyway, Karkat explains to Nepeta what’s going on. He, Terezi, Gamzee, and Tavros are already playing; Tavros needs a server player. GA is lined up for the Red Team, but doesn’t want to connect yet for mysterious reasons, so Nepeta’s the best candidate. Nepeta agrees, but wants to talk to someone else first.

CG: HOW CAN YOU BE BEST FRIENDS WITH THE ONLY GUY ON THE PLANET WHO'S A BIGGER ASSHOLE THAN ME. AC: :33 < hes not so bad! CG: HE'S SCUM. CG: BUT DO WHATEVER YOU'VE GOT TO DO I GUESS. CG: TAVROS IS WAITING.

This seems quite a distance from Nepeta declaring that the guy she needs to talk to “scares her” earlier on. May be a retcon.

Said friend proves to be the blue Sagittarius boy, still in shadow. I think here it’s time to add on a point we brought up but did not count when observing the Pesterchum Trollslum: his handle is centaursTesticle. I remind everyone the trolls are supposed to be thirteen. What a charming child. I guess maybe it’s excusable because he’s not a mammal himself, but still.

CALL CPA PLEASE: 9

He says hi, but becomes frustrated when Nepeta roleplays at him. He types in dark b100, is e%cessively formal, and precedes each line with a D→ emoticon, the significance of which will be explained in a moment.

CT: D --> This is f001ishness upon one hundred thousand prior, equally unsolicited f001ishnesses

FAILURE ARTIST: It’s weird that his first word is “hi”, considering how formal he usually is.

CHEL: Could be because he knows Nepeta well? A concession to her mannerisms?

He expects Nepeta to follow his orders; she stops roleplaying, but complains about him being “so lame!” and never roleplaying with her, even though he will go out of his way to find words with “x” or “loo” in them so he can use his quirk. He tells her off for using foul language at things as mild as “what the hell?” and she apologises.

CT: D --> Your fraternization with the base classes have 100sened your morals, can't you see this AC: :33 < no! i dont care, they are fun AC: :33 < and i dont know anything about classes or bases or blood color, it doesn't matter! AC: :33 < what does gr33n blood even mean! it doesnt mean anything to me and it shouldnt mean anything to anyone else! CT: D --> Well, green b100d is ok, but it's not great CT: D --> But that's why you're lucky to have me to 100k out for you CT: D --> Because you don't know better, and you can't fight the role the mother had in store for you

This relationship looks rather worrying from a human perspective, I must say. Still, Nepeta seems to be holding her own in the argument, and he’s not physically present so there’s little he can do to actually harm her if things go south.

FAILURE ARTIST: Yeah, early on this relationship looks bad, but this relationship is one of the more popular ones in Homestuck.

CHEL: Did he plan their relationship, or ascend the fanon? Do we know?

FAILURE ARTIST: I would say there wasn’t enough time for Equius/Nepeta to be fanon, giving the quick update rate for this arc, but fandom does work fast.

Nepeta doesn’t seem to be just against the hemospectrum but rather ignorant of it, which is odd considering how important it’s supposed to be. Then again, she does live in a cave.

BRIGHT: Considering how important the hemospectrum is supposed to be, a surprising number of characters don’t understand it or care about it. That’s two out of nine so far. And while the hemospectrum does add a layer of complication, it’s not that complicated. There are only (spoiler) eleven colours in official use, and most readers pick them up pretty quickly. Characters living in a society which violently enforces it should have a working grasp of it, even if they think it’s stupid as all get-out.

WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 26

CHEL: Nepeta points out he always puts his bow and arrow symbol at the start of lines, which she considers a sign of playfulness and he considers “highly dignified symbols”. Nepeta asks if he’s ever successfully fired a bow, and he refuses to talk about it.

CT: D --> The topic is making me CT: D --> Sweat

He does this a lot. Here it seems to be a sign of feeling awkward and embarrassed, but later on it will be the source of CALL CPA PLEASE points.

They argue; Nepeta calls him a “weirdo and a cr33p!” and says it’s good she’s there to watch out for him in turn because no one else likes him, and he tells her off for eating animals. So trolls aren’t fully carnivorous? Their teeth suggest they should at least lean more strongly that way than humans do, but I guess eating vegetation wouldn’t be impossible for them.

CT: D --> You're wrong about me, Nepeta CT: D --> I do like to play games CT: D --> But they must be e%tremely important games with very high stakes CT: D --> Not the kind played by trans100cent green wigglers who let 100se an e%cremental surge hard in their wiggler-bottom diaperstubs

Nice callback, though I’m kind of surprised he said “bottom” since he draws the line at “hell”. Also, why the hell would trolls have diapers? They’re raised by literal animals, most of which don’t have hands to change them with!

WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 27

FAILURE ARTIST: What we see later of troll infants, they don’t have bottoms to diaper.

CHEL: Equius informs Nepeta he’s leading the Blue Team; she’s already on the Red Team, but he forbids her to join it and says she must join him.

AC: :33 < *ac rolls her eyes almost as hard as she is rolling around in this really interesting smell* CT: D --> The thought of you fraternizing with and abetting those stink-b100ded h001igans strikes me as scandal beyond measure CT: D --> I'm afraid you're too delicate to withstand that sort of corruption

Didn’t he also forbid her from associating with the people on the Blue Team on the grounds of them being too dangerous to hang out with? There’s no pleasing this guy.

Nepeta tells Tavros she can’t join him. She’s angry at her friend, though she’s still obeying him, but Tavros thinks it’s for the best.

AC: :33 < *ac curls up in tavroses lap* AT: oKAY, *i, AT: fOR THE TIME BEING, aND, AT: fOR THE SAKE OF THIS FANTASY SCENARIO, i PRETEND, AT: tHAT MY CAT ALLERGIES AREN'T THAT BAD,* [...] AT: wELL, AT: iF YOU DIDN'T LISTEN TO HIM BEFORE, AT: yOU MIGHT HAVE PLAYED GAMES WITH US BEFORE, AT: aND SOMETHING BAD MIGHT HAVE HAPPENED TO YOU,

All very well, but notice what’s wrong with this picture?

I am… not particularly happy about more wheelchair slapstick going as far as to cause what I guess could be called either pet death or parent death. Most people in wheelchairs are able to not do that. Wouldn’t he at least notice it going over the bump? The “lol the weak wimpy kid has allergies” thing isn’t marvellous either; Tavros’ supposed wimpiness isn’t a huge deal yet, but it will be.

CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 35

BRIGHT: Uh...okay, wow. I somehow didn’t notice Tinkerbull dying like that the first time I read this, and WTF, Hussie?

Tavros reminisces about his role-playing days. We get a flashback to him standing in his room pre-paralysis, dressed in a green Peter Pan outfit and wielding a very short lance he calls a ‘daggerlance’. He is preparing to play FLARP, an EXTREME ROLE PLAYING game which can have serious real-world consequences if played without caution. Tavros is part of Team Charge, and they will be playing against Team Scourge.

The other member of Team Charge is Aradia. Tavros starts a chat with her, and Aradia sounds a lot more animated in this one. She actually seems pretty cheerful and enthusiastic! They talk a bit about Tavros’s choice of class, the Boy-Skylark; apparently it’s not very strong early on, but picks up some powerful abilities once you reach a high level. Put a pin in that, it’s not directly relevant but it does echo some Class traits later on.

Tavros’s FLARP grub lays some eggs ...

CHEL: Troll technology is disgusting.

BRIGHT: … which hatch into neon pixellated bats called GAMING FLAPSTRACTIONS. These contain the data used to provide the roleplaying scenario, and will also follow live instructions provided by the ‘clouder’. One member of Team Scourge will act as Tavros’s clouder, creating a challenging scenario for him to adventure through. Aradia will be the clouder for Terezi, the other member of Team Scourge. The flapstractions are tied to the player’s vital attributes, which is what makes this sort of role playing so dangerous. It’s interesting that apart from SGRUB, trolls have video games which physically affect the real world, or at least some of the players.

CHEL: Which brings up a comment we made on an earlier Act; does everyone in John’s version of Earth have sylladexes, and do all their videogames affect reality? We never see.

BRIGHT: A little way into the game, and Tavros has been backed up to the edge of a cliff by a couple of FLARP monsters. His clouder contacts him to ask why he’s not moving; turns out it’s AG. Tavros tells her that the monsters are too strong for the level he’s at. AG responds by mocking him, calling him weak, and urging him to either advance or abscond. Tavros asks her to hold on, and tries to contact Aradia for help, then Terezi.

We get another glimpse of AG! She has a blue sign, has one hooked horn and one with a crescent tip, messy hair, and here is wearing an eyepatch with seven red dots over one eye. She appears to be standing in the field with Tavros, which clearly isn’t possible.

CHEL: Holograms, presumably.

BRIGHT: Tavros can’t get through to either Aradia or Terezi. AG starts messaging him again, telling him to roll the dice. Tavros, entirely sensibly, declines to do so, as he’s run the numbers and the monsters are too strong to beat no matter how well he rolls. AG says that if he won’t move, she’ll make him move.

AT: i THOUGHT, AT: yOU COULDN'T USE POWERS, AT: i MEAN, rEAL LIFE POWERS, nOT GAME ONES, AT: iT'S AGAINST THE RULES, AG: 8ut if you are going to 8reak the rules and refuse to roll, what choice do I have!

Using her psychic powers, she then takes control of his body.

And walks him off the cliff.

AG: Fly, Pupa!!!!!!!! AG: Flyyyyyyyy!

CHEL: This is our introduction to the most controversial character in the whole fandom, and quite possibly one of the most controversial in any fandom. So much as mentioning this girl can start huge flamewars, and there was an entire section of the official Homestuck forum set off for talking about her so it didn’t taint the experience on the other boards. We’ll see more of this behaviour from her later, and discuss the fandom’s opinion of it as we go.

AG types out a long string of mocking laughter, with eight exclamation marks. I believe five is the point Pratchett deemed to be a sign of insanity, what does eight signify? Anyway, Tavros takes out his phone and texts the first person he thinks of; Karkat.

adiosToreador [AT] began trolling carcinoGeneticist [CG] AT: aG JUST JUMPED ME OFF A CLIFF, AT: wITH MY BRAIN, AT: aND, uHH AT: mY LEGS, aLSO, AT: aND NOW, tHEY FEEL, AT: iNVISIBLE, AT: wOW, i'M SURE THERE WAS A BETTER WAY TO SAY THAT, AT: aNYWAY, AT: tHAT'S REALLY ALL THERE IS, AT: tO REPORT ON THE SUBJECT, AT: oF ME GETTING HURT, CG: HEY ASSHOLE, STOP PLAYING GAMES FOR GIRLS. carcinoGeneticist [CG] ceased trolling adiosToreador [AT]

It’s times like these I wonder if we should have stolen the RP1 spork’s “Why Are We Meant To Like You, Again?” count. Let’s tally up the ones we have…

First off, Karkat, you’re a sexist dick and a bully, and the narrative never calls you out on it, nor do the other characters.

CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 36

Second, two SLAMMER points, one for the sexism, and one for hanging up on a clearly injured person, when Karkat is supposed to be portrayed as “prickly but caring”, which is not consistent with this even if he doesn’t much like Tavros or know him well at this point.

SEND THEM TO THE SLAMMER: 3

And third, what the hell is the point of the “GAMES FOR GIRLS” comment? Karkat’s phrasing implies that this is a contemptible, weak thing to do. Considering the incredibly dangerous nature of the game, that makes no sense at all. Fandom likes to charitably interpret it as meaning that female trolls are expected to be more violent than the male ones and Karkat’s telling Tavros not to get himself hurt, but that doesn’t work either because in every other situation Tavros is socially punished for not being violent, forthright, and traditionally masculine, and as I said, Karkat’s phrasing and immediate hanging-up on Tavros implies contempt, not concern. If it was meant the way a human boy would put it, what the hell are games for troll boys like?!

WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 28

One way I’ve played it in fanfic is that female trolls are expected to be the strategisers, while male ones just barge on through, but that’s just my personal idea, not canon.

BRIGHT: Really the only way this could be read as not completely awful is if Karkat thought Tavros was role-playing the injury. But there’s no reason for him to think that; Karkat’s made his lack of interest in it abundantly clear, and we never see Tavros initiate a role-playing chatlog with anyone, even one of the other FLARPers. In fact, all the FLARPers seem to confine their role-playing to the game itself; the only person who role-plays in chatlogs is Nepeta. (And after this, it’s easy to see why CT didn’t want her FLARPing.) So Karkat’s being a real dick here.

FAILURE ARTIST: There’s not really any charitable explanation for this. The fandom is just content to prove Karkat wasn’t sexist on human terms.

BRIGHT: Also, this is an impressively coherent summary of events from Tavros. If I’d just walked off a cliff and broken my back, I’m not sure I’d be up to texting anybody, let alone explaining things that clearly. Tavros gets short shrift for being weak, but he’s really pretty tough.

We jump back to Karkat in the Medium, having just finished the conversation with Terezi we saw earlier. AG starts messaging him, and Karkat is really not impressed.

AG: Hey 8rave leader. CG: OH MY GOD, WHY ARE YOU TALKING TO ME. AG: Can I join your team? CG: YES I'M GLAD YOU ASKED, BECAUSE THERE IS A WIDE OPEN SLOT FOR THE MOST VILE BACKSTABBING SOCIOPATH WHO EVER LIVED. CG: YOU REALLY HELPED ME OUT OF A JAM BY STEPPING FORWARD. AG: Vile 8acksta88ing sociopath? Karkat, did you copy and p8ste that phrase directly from your personal ad descri8ing what you are looking for in a lady? CG: HA HA HA! CG: MORE CAGEY CUTESY BULLSHIT. CG: LIKE I'M NOT UP TO MY LOBE STEM WITH THAT ALREADY HAVING TO DEAL WITH TEREZI. CG: YOU BOTH MUST HAVE BEEN INSUFFERABLE WHEN YOU WERE A TEAM. CG: YOUR OPPONENTS PROBABLY ALL JUST TRIED TO COMMIT SUICIDE AFTER A FEW MINUTES OF PUTTING UP WITH YOUR FANGY GRINNED DRIVEL. CG: THAT'S PROBABLY HOW IT ALL WENT DOWN WHEN THE SHIT HIT THE THRESHER.

AG continues to mess around and Karkat continues to be adamant about not wanting to be friends with her. He warns her not to use her mind control abilities on his teammates, and finishes up with something that actually seems to hit home.

CG: I'VE GOT THE BETTER SCOURGE SISTER ON MY TEAM AND IF YOU BREAK YOUR TRUCE YOU'LL HAVE TO ANSWER TO HER. CG: THE FUNNY THING IS SHE WAS ALWAYS WAY BETTER THAN YOU EVEN WITHOUT ANY POWERS. CG: YEAH THAT'S RIGHT, I KNOW YOUR WHOLE STORY. CG: YOU WERE ALWAYS JEALOUS SHE COULD MANIPULATE PEOPLE SO WELL WITHOUT RESORTING TO CHEAP MIND TRICKS. CG: HAHA, I CAN TELL THIS BURNS YOU AND I CAN'T EVEN PAW THROUGH YOUR DUMPSTER! CG: CHALK IT UP AS ANOTHER INFURIATING VICTORY FOR GUTTER BLOOD OVER ARISTOCRACY.

It’s interesting that although Karkat is extremely cagey about his blood colour, he identifies himself here as a lowblood. Granted, that’s the most logical conclusion to make -- a highblood would have no reason to conceal their blood caste -- but blood colour wasn’t even being discussed until he brought it up.

Karkat ends the chatlog, and then immediately starts messaging AG again.

AG: Oh, 8ack so soon! Did your thum8 slip on the 8utton???????? AG: I guess you can't get enough of me. AG: ::::) CG: YOU MADE ME DO THAT. CG: AND YOU KNOW IT. AG: You 8n't got nothing on me and you can't prove shit!!!!!!!! AG: Anyway, Karkat, I just wanted to say. AG: <3

...okay, I assume she’s using that in a mocking way, because we never get any other indication that she’s romantically interested in Karkat, but man, that threw me for a moment.

FAILURE ARTIST: AG says she can read Karkat’s mind and it’s implied she made Karkat slip up, but you’d think even with Karkat’s mind being a dumpster she’d still find it impossible to resist finding out his blood color.

CHEL: Impossible to not find it, in fact! It must be pretty prominent in his thoughts if it’s important enough to hide.

BRIGHT: The narration then hops to the blue Sagittarius boy, and...uh.

Wow, those sure are a lot of weirdly sexual posters and dismantled robots.

Let’s not beat about the bush here: Teens are (generally) interested in sex and very good at getting hold of depictions of it. On the other hand...thirteen is kind of on the young end for that. Also, most people don’t display their pornography proudly on their walls, although as I type this I remember that cheesecake pin-ups used to be a thing. Heck, maybe they still are. Either way, this is kind of disturbing.

CALL CPA PLEASE: 10

CHEL: Then again, I was never very close to any teenage boys when I was that age; for all I know, maybe they would stick their porn on their walls if they didn’t have parents to stop them.

I’d like to point out the unfortunate implications in having the narrator sound as disturbed as they do in conjunction with all his posters being of male characters. There are plenty of other reasons to be disturbed, plus his interactions with girls are even more disturbing, but as we proceed we’ll see hints that that possibly was meant to be part of the disturbance. Hussie has a real discomfort with m/m attraction, and it shows more than he meant it to.

CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 37

Since the trolls aren’t mammals and their anatomy isn’t necessarily anything a mammal would recognise, fandom’s occasionally had some fun with interpreting this as him not realising the posters are so explicit and just having them because he thinks they look cool, but that’s obviously not the intended meaning.

BRIGHT: I think the reader is also meant to be bothered by the posters being furry art. Honestly that part doesn’t bother me, but furries were the butt of a lot of jokes back in 2009 -- and possibly still are, although I haven’t seen any for years.

FAILURE ARTIST: Personally, when I saw this panel, I was peeved that he wasn’t introduced yet. I liked the cut of his jib for displaying such “art”. Of course, there’s also the shiner his lusus sports which may play a part in the narrator’s discomfort.

BRIGHT: The narration is as disturbed as I am, although possibly for different reasons, and promptly switches to a brief glimpse of the last troll we have to meet, who has dark pink goggles, a Pisces sign, and is prodding a cuttlefish with a trident. Before we can learn anything more about her, off we go again!

This time we return to Aradia, who is flying across the countryside atop the severed head of the frog statue. Her hive, when she reaches it, is in ruins and overgrown by vegetation.

You haven't been here since the night of the accident. On that night you found your CALLING. The voices of the dead grew louder, urging you to return to the ruins you discovered not long before. You left so abruptly, you didn't even have time to bury your lusus. But that's fine, because trolls don't typically bury their dead. Leaving bodies to be consumed by wild animals is more customary.

We’ve already seen that role-playing accidents on Alternia can be pretty damn extreme, and given that Aradia has telekinesis it’s not a stretch that property damage could get involved, but this is still very effective build-up to the reveal of What’s Up With Aradia. On my first read-through I was really curious about what had happened, and I still think it holds up well.

Aradia starts up the game and allows her co-leader to enter first, since she always intended to enter second. She then has Nepeta connect to her as her server player, and starts setting up the equipment. Since she doesn’t have a dead lusus to prototype the kernelsprite with, she uses the head of the frog statue instead. The dead have assured her that this is critical for later success.

Compelling your nonplussed server player to perform this task might have proven difficult. Luckily your telekinesis, an ability greatly magnified through your CALLING, would be sufficient to move the massive object, whereas the game cursor likely would not. Your server player simply watched in mystification.

Sprite sorted out, Aradia enters the Medium. Her classpect is MAID OF TIME, and her planet is the LAND OF QUARTZ AND MELODY, which is very pretty. It was important for her to enter second because her client player, presumably AG, has a present for her which can’t be replicated with grist, so they’re going to have to travel through the Gate above their house to get it to her.

Nepeta, meanwhile, is watching in befuddlement, because she can’t see Aradia on the screen...up until Aradia merges with the Frogsprite.

She couldn't see you up until the moment after the sprite's second prototyping. Because you were dead all along.

HOLY SHIT.

The first time I read Homestuck, this reveal blew me away. (Granted, I was a bit confused by all the hopping around between characters and time points. It makes much more sense on the second read.) It probably wasn’t intended as much of a surprise, given the next page…

We are all completely blown away by this stunning revelation.

Fair enough.

[homespork-review]

Homespork Act 3: Insane Mindscrew Haymakers (Part 2)

CHEL: Rose finds a transportaliser platform in the centre of the lab.

FAILURE ARTIST: The sylladex misadventures come to something this time. Jasper’s corpse lands on the pad.

CHEL: The dead cat vanishes; Rose assumes it was vapourised but we know better, though we don’t see where it went. She finds an unlocked hub and plugs in, noticing another ominous countdown on the wall, with only three minutes left till the lab will be “UNESTABLISHED”.

Years in the future again, PM beheads the worm creature, which turns out to be a robot. The bunker landed on its side so PM stands on a pile of mailboxes to press the button, which causes more robot worms to emerge from beneath the bunker, pushing it upright, and a propeller to emerge from the top and carry it away.

Dave’s strife with Bro continues, getting more and more ridiculous and animesque, until Dave ends up plummeting down the stairwell. In a realistic work, this could quite easily break his neck, but here we just get some comical flailing and a SBaHJ IT KEEPS HAPPENING macro. Again, Dave looks more angry than afraid.

ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 8

FAILURE ARTIST: I think Hussie said the Bro slicing the Abscond box is symbolic of the trap of child abuse and shows this guardian fight isn’t like the others but it is still an animesque fight that ends with a fucking meme.

CHEL: Yeah, he seems to be expecting us to pick up on these details which don’t mean anything until he actually explains them, which would be fine and in fact clever if they didn’t conflict so strongly with what’s actually noticeably shown. If he wanted us to take it seriously, he’d have done better not to put the Abscond button there at all.

Rose finds, in the lab, a console showing SBurb sessions in the northeastern US where her home is located, monitoring the time to impact of their respective meteors. There is a large cluster of already-landed ones around her house, with a much, much bigger one centred directly on the lab, with an even bigger one centred on the house. She zooms out, and finds the second-biggest upcoming impact in the world is heading for Texas, while one bigger by an order of magnitude will later land in the middle of the Pacific. "Oh look, up in the sky/ It's a hole about the size of Texas..."

"Circus Contraption - Hot Potato" (Watch on YouTube)

Checking on John’s house, Rose finds it overrun by imps, the building shaking violently. Investigating this, she finds the ogre fight; John is at least getting a few blows in now, but they’re still not doing much good. Nannasprite is able to provide support with eye beams, but the ogres are still standing, and Rose’s attempt to drop a fridge on one is useless too. Nannasprite’s teleportation proves more useful, allowing John to take a flying leap out of a hovering oven to strike with greater force and allowing her to drop a full avalanche of household appliances on the ogre. With Rose’s assistance providing him a platform to bounce off again, John strikes the final blow on one ogre, exploding it into grist pieces bigger than himself, and Nannasprite and John occupy the other ogre until Rose drops the alchemiter on it.

FAILURE ARTIST: Seeing a fight like this not long after the Bro and Dave fight makes it hard for me to take the serious one seriously. John should be dead.

CHEL: John has a backup healer and Dave doesn’t, but yeah, cartoon physics prevail here.

Rose checks in, explaining that Dave’s not connected yet, but that she’s determined that activating the cruxtruder does not actually cause the meteor to strike. John levels up to BOY-SKYLARK and collects tons of grist and boondollars, although he still doesn’t know what those actually do.

You can't wait to find out what amazing items this new supply of grist will be just barely insufficient to produce.

Hehehe. We’ve all been there.

John sees that more grist fell down to the platform below, including one huge piece stuck in the hole leading into Dad’s room.

One of those big SOUR GRAPE ELECTRIC HOLOCAUST FRUIT GUSHERS is jammed in the hole in the platform. CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 9

Yes, because Holocaust references are a perfect way to describe candy flavours. Technically “holocaust” can refer to, I quote from dictionary.com, “a great or complete devastation or destruction, especially by fire”, and I’m guessing it’s a parody of all the flavour names with words like “explosion” in them, but, especially when it’s not obviously uncapitalised, that’s very much not what the immediate association of the term is!

FAILURE ARTIST: John asks Nanna why she doesn’t just throw him up to the gate and she says it’s important he build up himself. Though later we do see a character that just jumps up to the gate.

Then we switch to a mysterious castle all in purple. Dad is fighting some imps with shaving cream. A new yet somehow familiar character wearing harlequin clothes watches with disgust both Dad and John on strange window screens.

We cut away yet again to Peregrine Mendicant. PM is still stuck in the mobile station with a letter addressed to David Brinner. There was a real person who went by the alias Doctor Brinner on his Portland-area radio show where he played a mad scientist. Dr. David Brinner is also a comic Hussie made before Homestuck. I’ve never read it myself. I didn’t even know it existed until I googled David Brinner.

Anyway, PM refuses to open this letter and gives stirring speeches that sound like they come from a movie (Kevin Costner’s Postman?) but I don’t think they do.

BRIGHT: PM believes very strongly in the purpose of mail delivery as the bedrock of civilisation. It comes across as funny, but not as mocking.

FAILURE ARTIST: PM then turns to the terminal. Jade appears on a screen shrouded in green static. PM finds Jade familiar. Unfortunately, before PM can converse with Jade, the terminal explodes.

Cut back again to Rose in the lab. There’s lots of cutesy pink little girl stuff down there that Rose decides to ignore. Why is it down there? Did Mom expect Rose to live there one day?

CHEL: I thought it was supposed to signal that Mom was living down there herself.

FAILURE ARTIST: Anyway, Rose also finds a mutant cat.

We cut away again to John contemplating going into his father’s bedroom through a hole in the roof. He decides to do it.

Cut to a fireplace with a portrait of Jade above it. It looks similar to Nanna’s shrine, minus the urn. But Jade isn’t dead, is she? She scampers right into the room the next panel. She arms herself with a huge rifle and tries to sneak across the room. However, her Grandpa appears, shadowed by the huge fire that suddenly lit up in the fireplace. She tries to run away only to fall asleep.

We cut to Dave’s final round - or rather, Jade fighting her Grandpa. Who, in another surprise, is a taxidermed corpse.

She talks to him like he’s alive, though after it, she says he was easier to deal with when he was alive. This disturbing state of affairs is never treated seriously.

CHEL: This, more than anything else, is why we set up the ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY count. Horrible as Bro would be by any realistic standards, at least Dave’s guardian is obviously living and Dave is not merrily talking away to a dead person. We later find out that Jade was the one who taxidermied Grandpa, while she was barely more than a toddler. Not only was she actually able to do this to professional standards, at an age when she shouldn’t have been handling sharp objects at all, but she displays no trauma from it, nor from having had to raise herself. And yet we’re supposed to take Dave’s issues seriously, and to a much lesser extent Rose’s, with no real indication that they’re any different.

TIER: It's one thing when an author's intended depiction of “an abusive household” for the most part flies over people's heads due to the absurdity of the whole situation when it initially got presented, that happens sometimes! Especially when one factors in Bro's total screen time, how he generally ticks the boxes for “absurd but really cool” guy visually, and how late in the game this knowledge was spelled out. It all comes together to make the whole Strider situation kinda come out of left field to judge people for finding the absurd situation funny.

But when it's sitting right next to the arguably worse scenario (stuffed.dead.guardian.) and the latter pretty much never gets brought up while the former gets a big ol’ spotlight shining down on it, yeah that's what the folks call Fucking Weird and in my personal opinion, suspect Ò_Ó.

CHEL: While I can’t really state one way or the other at this point, I do think it’s worth considering a reason that has already been brought up by a non-Homestucker; in the scenarios we’re not supposed to take seriously, the children are girls. I doubt this was even slightly what Hussie intended, but it certainly explains a lot about the fandom’s reactions. The more likely scenario regarding the canon explanation is probably that the ones we’re not supposed to take seriously are not Hussie’s self-insert.

ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 9

BRIGHT: Not to mention, Jade grew up on an island in the middle of the ocean, physically isolated from any other people and with only an animal for company. There are known cases of children who grew up in similar circumstances in real life. Suffice to say, it generally does not end well.

You could argue that Jade is pretending her Grandpa is alive because she’s lonely and needs the company, but this is in no way implied by the text.

At any rate, Jade informs her grandfather that the rifle she has is perfectly adequate for killing things and she doesn’t need his oversized blunderbuss.

CHEL: To be strictly fair, we do later find out she had some contact with other people, but not in a way which I feel would be a substitute for having a living human parent in the “real” world.

FAILURE ARTIST: With Jade out the door, we go again to PM. They are fine except for some cartoon burn marks and a fire on their hood. The metal snake saves their precious mailbox.

BRIGHT: It earns PM’s affection for doing so.

Back at the lab, Rose utterly fails to ignore the four-eyed mutant kitten. She carries it over to a peculiar machine that turns out to be another Appearifier. This one is locked onto her cat, Jaspers, nine years ago. Not only was he alive, but the younger Rose was holding a psychotherapy session with him.

Rose attempts to appearify Jaspers, but since this would cause a time paradox, the machine leaves Jaspers in place and instead produces a ‘Paradox Clone’, which swiftly collapses into green slime. The machine next to the appearifier sucks up the paradox sludge, analyses its genetic sequence, and spits out another cat, rather more mutated than the last, in a process referred to as ‘Ectobiology’.

CHEL: John’s screen name, we remind you, is “ectoBiologist”, so it seems he heard of the concept somewhere, perhaps?

BRIGHT: On the appearifier’s screen, Jaspers reveals a stunning secret to young Rose, and is appearified to an unknown location before he can clarify anything. Two weeks later, his corpse reappeared. Oddly, the appearifier can’t see his whereabouts for the intervening period.

It can, however, see where his body went when it landed on the pad earlier! Rose appearifies the corpse and hightails it out of the lab, using the transportaliser to make her escape before the meteor can hit.

FAILURE ARTIST: If you click on the pink horseshoe that appears at the end of the Rose: Fast Forward To Now flash, there’s a little animation of Rose enjoying Maplehoof. I guess she’s making up for the loss of her precious Jaspers.

BRIGHT: We make a brief detour back to Jade, who’s searching for Becquerel. Two new things about Jade’s mysterious abilities: One, Becquerel is invisible to them. Two, this is unusual enough that it used to disturb her. Becquerel appears briefly in the background, and there’s clearly something strange about him…

CHEL: Additionally, it was clearly his face that was carved on the pumpkin we saw earlier, and he looks canine but it’s hard to make out details at this point...

BRIGHT: But before we can find out more, the comic jumps back to John.

Now in his Dad’s room, John is struck by an unwelcome discovery — there aren’t any clowns. Not on posters, no figurines. His father’s briefcase, rather than being full of the tools of a street performer, holds only boring papers and spreadsheets. In fact, the room is pretty boring...like his Dad is just a normal businessman?

"[S] John: Examine your dad's room." (Watch on YouTube)

FAILURE ARTIST: I wish more had been made of Bing “Douchebag” Crosby in this comic but that’s just me being an old movie nerd.

BRIGHT: While John attempts to recover from the BSOD this causes, his father breaks out of a jail cell armed with a safe. This is watched with displeasure by another black figure in brightly-coloured clothing, whose name is not Spades Slick. (He likes the ring of that, though.) No, he’s Archagent Jack Noir, and he oversees the affairs of a dark kingdom through three fenestrated walls.

CHEL: He usually has a fourth one but it got stolen.

FAILURE ARTIST: Those fingers typing the name Spades Slick are a suspicious color...

BRIGHT: He also despises the jester outfits everyone has been forced to wear, and refuses to don his comical hat until the Queen hijacks his fenestrated wall and orders him to wear it. The wall cuts back to Dad, who has now disarmed an especially burly-looking agent and is punching him in the head.

CHEL: Jack Noir makes mention of his carapace at this point; I don’t remember if his species is also referred to as “carapaces” in the comic but that’s the name the fandom knows them by. Guess we’ll see if they are as we go on.

BRIGHT: Meanwhile, John opens some birthday presents he found in his Dad’s room! He gets some Fruit Gushers, a very dapper suit, and best of all, an Array Fetch Modus, which lets him retrieve an item from any card in his deck! Of course, this would be too straightforward, so he combines it with his other Fetch Modii until he gets something properly inconvenient.

FAILURE ARTIST: How much do Modii cost and does everyone in this universe have one?

CHEL: The implication is tech like this is how Skaianet made its money, but since we never really see anyone who’s not involved somehow with the game, we don’t really get a good sense of the company being part of the world, so we don’t know. If I had to guess, though, I’d think getting the sylladex in the first place costs a big lump sum and then the various fetch modii cost much smaller amounts, sort of like apps on a phone or programs on a computer.

When prompted, John closely examines the Fruit Gushers box, this flavour being “MASSIVE TROPICAL BRAIN HEMORRHAGE”. Tasty…? John thinks so. However, in the corner of the box is a small, easily-missed logo…

THE HEINOUS BATTERWITCH HAS HER GNARLED CLAWS IN EVERYTHING.

After the destruction of his planet, the disappearance of his father, the appearance of his ghost grandma, and fighting numerous monsters, THIS is what finally sends John over the edge into a full-out meltdown, despite the onscreen caption declaring that THIS IS STUPID.

FAILURE ARTIST: I actually have a box of Fruit Gushers signed by Andrew Hussie.

CHEL: Back on the island, Jade, accompanied by dramatic music, attempts to retrieve a blue package from the ruins, but just as she reaches it, Becquerel appears between her and it, and we snap right back into STRIFE!

"[S] Jade: Retrieve package." (Watch on YouTube)

Becquerel, as we can now see clearly, is an enormous white dog, lacking facial features of any kind and emitting crackling green lightning - worthy of the description “devilbeast”, I think. Jade aims her rifle at his head and takes multiple shots, but none hit. The first heats up and melts into nothingness. When the second is fired Becquerel turns into green fire and next frame he and Jade are both riding on the now-enormous bullet which carries them across the lagoon to the other side of the island. Becquerel teleports the third bullet into space and himself and Jade to the top of the frog building, and he teleports himself out of the way of the fourth, the background flashing through several different locations. Finally, Jade shoots a bullet in the opposite direction with the instruction GO FETCH!, which Bec does, giving Jade time to grab the package. She rewards Bec for fetching with the irradiated steak and announces that he is a GOOD DOG, BEST FRIEND. After dancing around in celebration, she very abruptly falls asleep again, and Bec scoops her up on his back, takes her back to bed, and tucks her in.

FAILURE ARTIST: The music in Jade: Retrieve Package

is another replacement. Currently it’s An Unbreakable Union by Robert Blake but originally it was Mutiny by Bill Bolin. The original is very retro science fiction and the replacement is safari.

CHEL: For the record, real dogs are not horses and are not built to carry people like that, even very small children can damage a large dog’s back by riding it, but given Bec’s abilities, I don’t think that applies to him.

Rose comes out the other side of the transportaliser, she and the cat having both kept their atoms unmingled, and discovers she’s back in the house, in the room she thought was her mother’s bedroom. It seems the cutesy pink bed and stuff in the lab was in fact her mother’s bedroom, and this room is a well-stocked bar.

You decide not to be especially melodramatic about this revelation.

Good idea, Rose; there isn’t time, as the lab is promptly unestablished by a meteor, sending flaming debris flying through the window. The booze-filled room is especially endangered by this, so Rose decides to flee.

John punches some more cards and complains that he’s the one doing the work while Rose is just messing around on her computer, while Jade dreams and little red lights on her bedposts glow. A metal cabinet in the corner of her room has similar red lights on top, and it bursts open, revealing a Jade-shaped robot.

Sudden cut to a mysterious copy of Jade’s bedroom, except with pink walls, in which Jade stands, wearing a golden dress. Back in her real room, the DREAMBOT stands in the same position. The gold-clad Jade is, we find, a depiction of Jade in her dream. Dream Jade tries to get into bed, but complains of a heavy weight pressing down on her, as the robot is copying her actions and is now lying on top of the real sleeping Jade. Instead, she decides to fly, which of course she can do since it’s a dream (and the robot has jet propulsion).

The dream room also contains the blue package, addressed to “GG” from “GT”. This isn’t John’s current handle, but she knows it’s from John, and that she must deliver it to somewhere else without opening it.

Flashback to the previous winter. In a shot of John’s window, we see his calendar and the edges of some of his posters. The calendar is marked with smiley faces in party hats in green, red, and purple, marking Jade, Dave, and Rose’s birthdays, but more noticeably, there are creepy faces with jester hats and huge teeth scrawled on the wall and posters. I didn’t notice it until just now, but there are some purple lines on the arm of one of the poster characters which might just be part of a drawn-on clown outfit but from this vantage point look like self-harm scars. Brr. Ominous.

John at this point in time is going by “ghostyTrickster” on Pesterchum, hence the “GT” nametag on the package. He’s chatting to Jade about having sent off everyone’s birthday gifts, and how he hopes Jade’s will “help you solve those problems you’ve been having lately”. John is embarrassed to realise it will take much longer than he thought for the package to reach Jade’s island, but she assures him it will arrive “exactly when it needs to”.

BRIGHT: With the reveal of John’s previous handle, and from the characters in the Trollslum, we also get the theme of the handle initials being the letters of DNA. (GCAT.)

FAILURE ARTIST: Jade complains about “trolls” and we have the first time this beloved and perhaps overshadowing species is named. However, John calls the “trolls” the r-slur so that’s another point.

CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 10

CHEL: Also, the trolls are why he changed his handle, in an attempt to avoid them bothering him.

FAILURE ARTIST: We go back to current day. John is peeved at the graffiti on his posters. He thinks it’s the imps. However, we just saw it was there months before. What is going on, hmmm?

Rose decides to name the cat Vodka Mutini. She then talks with John. Rose wonders where Dave is and John figures that Bro is kicking his ass. Considering that this ass-kicking is later treated as serious abuse, this is a callous thing for a friend to say.

ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 10

CHEL: I’d also say that counts as HURRY UP AND DO NOTHING. There’s not much an internet friend can do about someone’s abusive situation on the other side of the country but they could at least support Dave and tell him to call the police, if it is supposed to be that bad. Or at least, you know, be worried. Then again, Dave might not have told them what the ass-kicking entails, but Rose knows about his brother’s websites, and given that we know Bro made at least one film in which Dave was involved and may or may not have been on camera, and the film certainly would show the state the apartment was in…

HURRY UP AND DO NOTHING: 4

FAILURE ARTIST: Anyway, when John complains about his posters being defaced, Rose says they always looked that way. John naturally freaks out at this creepy revelation.

We cut to WV. They are trying to get down from the mobile station without sacrificing the MAYORAL SASH. While working the Appearifier, they get John’s present with an envelope addressed to “Mister Mayor”. After WV gets more cable, they rappel down the mobile station with the package under their arm.

Meanwhile, a figure in yellow caution tape watches WV through a sniper rifle. This is Aimless Renegade, a wonderful but forgotten character.

We go back to John and Rose. John discusses the mystery of the defaced posters while he futzes around with the Alchemiter. Rose thinks that John had blocked out the memory of defacing the posters and the revelation that his father isn’t who he thought he was unblocked his memory. She thinks maybe his father thought he was interested in clowns because John drew clowns everywhere. Yet John also wrote “LAME KID”? Maybe Dad should have taken John to therapy.

CHEL: “Lame kid” with arrows pointing down at his bed, to be exact, among other insults, and the clown faces don’t look like the product of someone who liked clowns at all!

ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 11 HURRY UP AND DO NOTHING: 5

Yet Dad Egbert is supposed to be the good parent of the group, so here we go with a new count:

RELATIONSHIP GOALS?: 1

This one’s primarily for romantic relationships, but other relationship fumbles apply too.

Rose thinks that the drawings are the result of John trying to express something subconscious, possibly a repressed past memory. John changes the subject to the upward building process; Rose complains that chimneys weren’t meant to bear such a weight, and considers switching to walls now they can get grist more easily, but she’s running out of time as the house proper is now on fire. John blames Dave, so I think we can assume that either they don’t know his brother forces him into swordfights or they don’t think it’s a problem. Which one is hard to determine.

FAILURE ARTIST: We cut to Jade playing a bass solo so advanced it doesn’t have a bass line. Another Bolin replacement. We find out Dream Jade is in a castle on a planet that’s a gold copy of the one Jack Noir and co are on. While flying around, she sees an inhabitant that looks familiar. CHEL: This is what I was referring to when I said Jade did have some contact with people; she is able to contact the carapaces in her dreams. However, the carapaces are, as we’ve seen from WV and company, somewhat childlike in behaviour, living in a society that’s nothing like Earth’s, biologically not the same as humans so they couldn’t easily advise her if she got ill or injured, and they don’t appear to be able or willing to speak, at least not most of the time and/or in a way the humans could understand, not to mention they would have no way to physically assist her in the waking world so she’d still have to raise herself from a very young age. Hence, why I don’t think they’re a substitute for an actual human parent.

[homespork-review]

Homespork Act 3: Insane Mindscrew Haymakers (Part 3)

FAILURE ARTIST: We cut to PM, WV, and AR in the far but not that far future. WV is trying to obey the letter’s direction to give the package to PM but AR keeps shooting. Yet WV and PM take cover behind a rock and WV is able to complete the task. The letter calls PM “Miss Mail Lady” so we now have a gender.

Back to Dream Jade. She flies to another golden tower and peers in on John sleeping. This bedroom is also defaced like his one in the waking world, plus there’s a creepy harlequin doll next to him. She isn’t sure if he got her present or if she even sent it, so she decides she’ll ask later.

CHEL: Dream John is fitfully asleep, but Jade intends to let him wake up on his own. Here, it’s established that Dream Jade does not know everything waking Jade does, as she decides she needs a system to remind her of things, which in the waking world she has (remember the COLORFUL REMINDERS).

The moon on which the city is now revealed to be placed is moving close to Skaia, the gargantuan sphere of cloudy blue sky mentioned by Nannasprite as the crucible of creation. Apparently it’s not safe to be outside during the “eclipse”, so Jade heads back to her tower.

FAILURE ARTIST: We cut to John alchemizing a bunch of stuff, some useful and some never to appear again. One of these things is a Cosbytop computer and that hasn’t aged well. John feels like it’s both his birthday and Christmas and though he thinks that’s impossible these pages came out a few days before Christmas. This fourth wall wink and nod comes up during another alchemizing frenzy.

CHEL: He contemplates a “1980s time-lapse montage” but instead we have to sit through him alchemising everything item by item.

GET ON WITH IT!: 12

Though he does come up with some useful stuff, including a rather snappy suit. By combining his glasses with the PDA he gets hands-free internet, and the sledgehammer, telescope, and Sassacre book together create the TELESCOPIC SASSACRUSHER, an extremely powerful weapon which unfortunately he can’t lift. Nannasprite’s ectoplasm and the gushers make healing candies, and ectoplasm, the fake arms, and the PDA solve the giant hammer problem by making REMOTE GHOST GAUNTLETS. One of the funnier items is a steam-iron-hammer he calls the WRINKLEFUCKER.

Dave, meanwhile, is STILL strifing with Bro, who apparently doesn’t notice or doesn’t care about the fact that the city is being flattened by meteors around them. Not doing a good job of showing “yes, this fight should be taken seriously”.

TIER: Neither does Dave for that matter, fucks given remains at a cool absolute zero on this roof.

GET ON WITH IT!: 13 HURRY UP AND DO NOTHING: 6

CHEL: At least it’s captioned FINAL ROUND now. Surrounded by watching crows, Dave hurls himself at Bro, and their collision results in the snapping of Dave’s sword, the bisection of Lil Cal (hooray!) and, somehow, the splitting of the picture of the record on Dave’s T-shirt; not cutting the cloth, turning the picture of a whole record into one of a broken record, which it will remain for the rest of its time in the story. Lots of analysis has been done by fans about how this represents Bro’s abuse shattering Dave’s true inner self, but in the context, it just looks like even sillier cartoon physics than we already had, if one even notices it (in the rush of visuals it’s easy to miss the first time round). It probably doesn’t help that Bro never actually says anything (nor do either of the other living adults), so we don’t really know what his thoughts on the matter are.

ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 12

Dave goes flying, rolling and skidding across the roof, landing in a rather battered-looking heap but with no serious harm done, and Bro chucks the game discs at him and… flies off on a hoverboard which I guess he has? Yet again, not adding to a serious tone here. Are hoverboards normal in this universe? Like the sylladexes, it was never established. Dave messages John, matter-of-factly telling him “bro just kicked my ass”. It’s still unclear how literal John thinks this ass-kicking is.

BRIGHT: This is apparently a universe in which some form of combat with one’s guardian is apparently routine, so John might well be thinking of Dave’s strifes with Bro as just a more intense version of a normal practice. On the other hand, by that same token, there’s nothing at this stage to say it isn’t just a more intense version of a normal practice. In fact, both John’s and Dave’s reactions suggest this is the case.

The problem really comes later on. If Dave’s situation is going to be taken seriously, then so should everyone else’s. Right now, although there are suggestions that all is not well, the tone of the text takes none of these situations seriously. It keeps everyone on a more even footing.

CHEL: Back on the golden moon, the eclipse is happening; during same, the moon and Jade’s tower thereupon, which are chained to the planet, swing right inside Skaia, surrounding it with clouds. On the surface of the clouds, we see images of events which happened earlier, including John’s house in the Medium, Rose’s house aflame, the tree in the desert, and the meteors falling on Dave’s city. This, we gather, is from where Jade obtains her mysterious information!

Dream Jade types messages to John, while the Dreambot types them out on a keyboard in the real world so he can actually get them. We proceed to see the same conversation about the package and SBurb we saw when Jade was first introduced, but this time I think a recap of it is actually pretty useful, especially the reference to the explosion. What happens is a little hard to parse, but as far as I can make out, a cloud shows a vision of a meteor emerging from a space portal, and the meteor actually emerges from the vision, becoming a cloud in the process. Said cloud-meteor then passes into a vision of Jade’s island when the volcano was still active and strikes down as the real meteor did in that time period. Jade, in her tower, hears it; I guess this is why it’s not safe to go outside during the eclipse?

In the volcano vision, we pull into a close-up shot of the lava-filled crater beneath the volcano, and a very familiar featureless canine head starts to emerge from it. Creepy.

Jade leaves the tower to check, and finds a vision of the lava with a blossom-like lit-up spirograph emerging from it, but when she tries to look, vision-Bec blocks her view of it, as the real Bec flies back and forth in front of the Dreambot. She messages John again, saying Bec doesn’t want her to go near the meteor crash site.

In John’s dream tower, the bed is empty; Dream John is now hovering outside it, eyes firmly shut. Jade sees him and drifts toward him, while John’s eyes slowly open. (This bit fuelled a fair amount of shipping at the time.) We see again the shaped clouds and the slowly approaching silhouette of Jade, revealing this to be the time when John fell asleep earlier, and at the exact same moment, real Jade and real John awake.

Again, we have a repeated conversation, this one being the one where Jade implores John to wake up. Now we know what she meant! Again, I think recapping this is reasonable, but maybe it could have been trimmed down so we just got the important points? That should have been done with all the repeat convos, really.

TIER: Personally speaking the little blurbs of repeated conversation shown during the flash would've gotten the point across without having to completely rehash the conversations.

With Jade awake properly, we get another convo rehash (now with proper context from both sides). Jade then consults her COLORFUL REMINDERS, as the visions of past and future events visible in the clouds as she sleeps can get very confusing very fast and the things help her put everything into usable info! With is fitting because dreams are trippy and easily forgotten. Jade notes two things: that this time there wasn't that much of future being shown, and that this is the first time that her dog guardian Bec has shown up a dream.

Bec has apparently never let Jade wander into the weird temple that is such a strange landmark of her island, but with the overpowered pooch taking a nap at the feet of his master's corpse, this is a good a time as any to try and pull one over him!

As Jade zip lines towards the temple and Rose continues construction on John's house, we cut back to Dave in the aftermath of the strife.

Dave is slightly saddened by poor Cal's “unfortunate” bisection (personally I was hollering because fuck that thing Jesus). His strife kind has also been turned into a ½ bladekind, courtesy of Bro fucking up his shit blade. Fucking rude man.

BRIGHT: Fighting with half a sword never seems to hinder Dave, but it still seems a silly thing to do when Bro quite possibly knew Dave was headed into heavy combat. It’s funny at the time though!

FAILURE ARTIST: When I first read Homestuck, I was sad Bro didn’t seem to care about Lil Cal, but with later revelations...would be better if that puppet never existed.

TIER: Dave attempts to grab the beta that he worked so hard for, but wouldn't ya know it his dang inventory is all filled up. Mostly with useless crap, as Dave admits as well. After a quick setup change for his modus, Dave finally has the beta! Congrats!!

CHEL: *looks pointedly at GET ON WITH IT count*

TIER: While Dave attempts to pester her, Rose has finished building up John's house, which marks the end of how much more she can help John as his server player. There's not much else to do for her till Dave shows up. She's also nearly done with John's gift, that'll show him that Rose is the God King of, and I am quoting right now “facetious sentimental gestures”. That's a peculiar and slightly worrying sentiment to have. What an adorably wordy yet cheeky little goth.

With that, we jump back a few months into the past, when it was Rose's 13th birthday. She's opening a package from John (signed under his old handle ghostyTrickster) containing the gift of knitting stuff (yarn and knitting needles) and a very dorky yet endearing letter from the blue boy. What a goof.

Rose is then pestered by one of the trollslum inhabitants, this one by the name of grimAuxiliatrix! They type Like This, And I Think It's Very Neat. Also quite verbose this one. Like personally I kinda need to carefully read and reread their words to get what the fuck they're trying to get to. In this case, it's politely bitching about humans while weird time related fuckery gets explicitly name dropped. Mainly the weird situation that is the trolls being/not being from the future. It's as confusing as it sounds.

CHEL: I think here’s the first indication that the trolls aren’t just other humans. Meanwhile, notice that one of the names in the Trollslum is “centaursTesticle”. Lovely. That character will, as the handle suggests, be the source of a LOT of CALL CPA PLEASE points. But anyway.

GA: No We Arent From "The Future" GA: But We Are All Already In Agreement That You Dont Get It And Never Will TT: I thought you said we spoke in the future. GA: We Did GA: Your Future GA: For Me It Was Only A Couple Minutes Ago TT: I understand. TT: You exist in some temporal stratum through which you have communication access to various points of my timeline. TT: It's not that complicated.

TIER: While that confusing thing keeps happening, we jump on over to a younger Dave, whole record shirt and dumb not-Kamina anime glasses wearing. He too is opening a birthday gift, which consists of his iconic aviators and a letter as well. The letter is just as endearing as the one John sent to Rose. Might just be my bias talking concerning how much John is undoubtedly and unchallenged my favorite character overall.

CHEL: I think so too, but I’m still giving him a point for him telling Dave his “gay butt stinks”, even though he is a twelve-year-old boy - it never gets called out or presented as bad that the kids say -ism-based insults until near the end, and that part has its own problems which we’ll get to then. The rest of it’s cute though.

CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 11

I’d like to bring up another webcomic which is known for its incredibly offensive humour; R. K. Milholland’s Something Positive. Specifically, I’d like to contrast the offensive humour of it with the offensive humour of Homestuck. In S*P, the point of the offensive humour is that the characters saying or doing the offensive thing are horrible people who should not be emulated, and even they disapprove strongly of homophobic/racist insults. Here is one of the tamer examples, from 2003 (so later comics have no excuse). Please note the character saying all this is both very drunk and very frustrated by having read a lot of terrible writing at the time, and his decision to do this comes back to bite him later.

In contrast, the point of Homestuck’s offensive jokes seems to be that either offensive things are inherently funny or the writer doesn’t realise why they’re offensive.

John tells Dave he thinks he needs to get out of his brother’s shadow, showing no concern for Dave’s actual wellbeing; more evidence that either they don’t know about the strifes or don’t care. The gift John has given is the glasses worn by Ben Stiller, which John suggests could replace Dave’s current anime shades. John worries that they’re “sort of a shitty present”, which again makes me wonder about the Egberts’ financial status - we weren’t able to find an actual figure for them but those things would cost thousands, so what the hell makes him call them “shitty”? How much did Hussie think movie memorabilia cost? Name of the count aside, we’re using it for when their economic statuses are weird in general, so here we go again:

WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 8

TIER: Dave too is dealing with a trollslum inhabitant, this one by the name of adiosToreador. It's around here that the trolls typing starts to get head tilt worthy. As Dave so eloquently puts it, toreador types like a tool. I mean, lOOK AT THIS, lOOK ME IN THE EYES, aND TELL ME THIS AIN'T RIDICULOUS.

CHEL: AT opens by telling Dave he’s awful, and Dave responds with frustration at having to deal with the trolls yet again. He complains that he’s “wasting good material on you guys” and that there’s no substance to their trolling; he also mentions one of them thinking he was a girl, which I think is the original source of the fandom’s popular female-to-male transgender Dave headcanon.

FAILURE ARTIST: I think it’s just that Dave is a popular character.

CHEL: I don’t know, it started well before the fandom started getting really enthusiastic about assigning identities to everyone, from what I saw, but maybe.

TIER: My two cents concerning this matter is that it's probably a combination of the two. Dave seems to resonate quite well with a great majority of the fans, so from what I've seen they more readily project onto him.

AT: i KNOW WHAT YOU'VE DONE, AT: oR WILL DO, aCTUALLY, AT: iT'S THE MOST AWFUL THING, tHE WORST YOU CAN EVER DO,

CHEL: The readers immediately start wondering what this thing is, but Dave is unconcerned, and immediately accuses AT of perving on him. Here is where the CALL CPA PLEASE count really starts to ramp up, because on one hand, yes it’s hilarious to watch the tables being turned, but on the other, this coming out of a boy who literally just turned thirteen that day is… uncomfortable for a lot of adult readers, especially since we know his home has obscene material lying around all over it and as mentioned before that can really mess up a kid, even if Bro was not in fact putting him in his movies directly.

TG: and i want to know exactly when i got to clear some space in my calendar for when some fuckwit blunders out of a magical phone booth and makes a ballad-inspiring play for my throbbing beef truncheon AT: sHOULD i BE PERTURBED BY THESE ALLUSIONS, TG: no man TG: look TG: i just need to know when to be there TG: when the stars come into alignment and your flux capacitor lets you finally sate your meteoric greed for crotch-dachshund TG: i wouldnt want to miss it and cause a paradox or something TG: itd suck if the universe blew up on account of you missing your window of opportunity to help yourself to a pubescent boy's naked spam porpoise AT: uHHH, AT: oK, THIS IS SORT OF STARTING TO UPSET ME, CALL CPA PLEASE: 5

TIER: How many words does a 13 year old need for his private parts? Asking for a friend. I get that Dave is a little gremlin but holy shit y'all.

CHEL: To quote Hiveswap, “SOUNDS LIKE SETUP TO ‘RIDDLE’ OR PERHAPS ‘JOKE’.” Or maybe a really weird rewrite of “Blowin’ in the Wind” and I just realised the (in)appropriateness of that song title. Anyway, I’m giving one CPA point for each of those elaborate descriptions. AT, perturbed, announces his intention to leave, but Dave continues.

TG: we're motherfuckin entrenched in this bitch TG: you and me TG: welcome to nam TG: now grab my hand and shimmy your soggy ass off that muddy bank before charlie gets the fuckin drop AT: uHHH, wHO, AT: wHO'S CHARLIE, TG: hes the guy whos gonna read our vows TG: im feeling pretty friggin MATRIMONIAL all a sudden TG: take a look down by your foot see that little bottle TG: stomp on that shit like its on fire TG: noisy ethnic dudes are flipping the fuck out and waving us around on chairs til someone gets hurt TG: im your 300 pound matronly freight-train TG: and my gaping furnace is hungry for coal so get goddamn shoveling AT: oH MY GOD, CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 14 WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 9

Hey, our first double point assignment! Two points for using the same racist joke again, as if it wasn’t offensive enough the first time. And another one for the fat joke.

FAILURE ARTIST: Lifting the newlyweds on chairs is a Jewish tradition so I guess Hussie’s antisemitism didn’t start this year.

CHEL: Isn’t stepping on a bottle a Jewish thing too? Does that count as more than one anti-Semitic joke or is it all part of the same one?

FAILURE ARTIST: Yeah, that’s also a thing. But I’d say it counts as one big joke.

CHEL: Does the Vietnam joke count as a separate one? I’m not sure what the general attitude to those is since about half of 20th-century British comedy revolves around WW2 jokes and no one minds those.

TG: thats what you see TG: a kaleidoscopic supernova of all your hopes and dreams all swishin together TG: radially effevescing arms of more little boy peckers than you can imagine TG: turning out insane corkscrew haymakers of a billion dancing vienna sausages strong CALL CPA PLEASE: 7

CHEL: All the counts aside, I can see what Hussie was going for and the general idea’s still amusing, culminating in one of the funniest bits in the comic when all this leads up to adiosToreador [AT] blocked turntechGodhead [TG] - I think we’ve all wanted to be Dave here. I’m fully aware that this sequence was meant to be somewhat uncomfortable, but given that Hussie later tries to tell us that Dave’s home life scarred him for real, yet he presented this as funny, it adds to the general feeling of Hussie berating the reader for laughing at the comedy. I think he was just trying to pander to the woke side of the fanbase with that, but we’ll get to it when we get there.

ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 13

FAILURE ARTIST: We go to AIMLESS RENEGADE, who has finally run out on his clip without hitting anyone. Apparently, some nitpicker on the forum (not me) pointed out the AR’s gun is magazine-fed, not clip-fed, but AR doesn’t give a shit about that.

CHEL: “A clip is not a magazine, a mag is not a clip; neither is a grip a stock, and "stock" does not mean grip.”

FAILURE ARTIST: AR examines the murals and declares the amphibian and reptilian images illegal pictography. AR arms themselves with a rocket launcher but wonders if they should befriend WV and PM - particularly PM. However, AR decides the two have committed too many crimes that make AR’s carapace steam. AR dresses as a judge (to complement WV as a mayor and PM as a mail carrier) and declares order in the court. AR wants to go down the moving platform to catch WV and PM but it isn’t operating right.

Closer to present time, Jade puts her gift to John on top of the monument. The gift disappears, just as Jade planned. Back in the future, PM looks at her drawing showing where she’s supposed to go. The drawing seems to be inaccurate until the tower is shot down. It turns out AR accidentally launched a rocket at it. AR tries again to hit the criminals but is distracted by PM’s beauty. Instead, AR shoots the mobile station. WV throws a can of Tab and PM grabs the package in a clever callback to SBaHJ’s sock ruse comic.

PM gets the package to the Appearifier and Sendifies it into Jade’s toddlerhood, back when Grandpa was alive and shooting butterflies. Inside the package is a letter from John, a too-big t-shirt with a blue ghost on it, and pumpkin seeds. So we have the root of Jade’s friendship with John and the others and her interest in gardening. That’s a very elaborate time loop.

CHEL: Get used to elaborate time loops. Anyway, the letter’s painfully adorable again. John thanks Jade for her years of friendship and for being the reason he met Rose and Dave. He gave Jade pumpkin seeds because future Jade had been upset that her pumpkins kept disappearing so he wanted to help her grow more. Unfortunately his declaration that three people is “almost like, TOO MUCH FRIENDSHIP” was cute at first glance, but given how he has no contact with anyone but them that we see, it becomes a tad creepy. Did he not expect to ever have any friends, or more than one friend? The implication that Dadbert kept him locked in his room all the time is looking more and more likely!

We cut to a cartoon sound effect, WHOP, and You bear the vicious brunt of this story transition directly in the face, “you” now being Archagent Jack Noir. The sound effect is the result of Dad Egbert punching Jack in the face. Jack pulls a switchblade, but Dad retaliates by lighting Jack’s hated jester hat on fire, throwing it to the ground, spraying shaving cream on it, and stomping on it. Jack immediately sets Dad free.

Jade is instructed by the prompt to “Play guitar to summon giant lily pads”, which she does, and it works… somehow? I’m not sure how that happens. Anyway, she uses the lily pads to hop over to the frog temple, finding in it a wall covered in tiny lime green glowing symbols.

Cut back to Dave, who has finally succeeded in installing the beta, and not a moment too soon as Rose’s room is now full of red light, soon to be aflame. Rose is calm enough to join Dave in a SBaHJ joke, and we go into the act-ending animation, [S] Enter.

Dave dramatically sips his fortunately-really-apple-juice and draws cartoons as the game loads, while Rose plays with Vodka Mutini and Jade scurries through the temple. For clarity’s sake, I’ll describe each character’s actions in a separate paragraph.

"Homestuck - [S] Enter [End of act 3]" (Watch on YouTube)

In Rose’s burning house Dave quickly deploys the necessary machinery. There’s so little safe room left to use that he has to throw Rose’s bed into the burning forest for one, put one in the observatory, and put the third on the nearby roof; fortunately Rose is able to get to them all. Dave uses the wizard statue to knock open the Cruxtruder, then drops it outside, breaking its hand off and sending the hand flying. He moves the cruxite to the lathe, where Rose produces a totem for her entry item, a bottle. Rose flings the dead Jaspers into the Kernelsprite and Dave grabs the Eldritch Princess doll to put in too, but the flying wizard statue hand knocks the entry item into the nearby waterfall. Rose leaps out over the drop, successfully catches it, and is in turn caught by a long purple tentacle....

Flaming whirlwinds approach the house; Rose swings the bottle to shatter it, and the meteor lands.

In the temple, we see an enormous flower atop another countdown device, noting four-and-a-half minutes till disaster, but Jade suddenly falls asleep again, waking up with only nineteen seconds to go. Unlike John randomly falling asleep mid-battle, this has been happening often enough to seem to be a legitimate problem with a story-based cause. Keep an eye on that.

Dave, meanwhile, is still in his room, which is now filled with crows. He seems flustered at first, but in a later shot he’s back at his computer with a crow perched on his head, seemingly fine.

Back at John’s house, Nannasprite opens up his newer copy of Sassacre’s book and starts to inscribe the very message we read earlier, so she didn’t in fact know about it during her life. Seems odd that she’d bother doing this rather than just saying it, though, especially since when she finishes, she drops the book into the chasm, where it plummets through grey clouds, emerging over a dark-blue land scattered with tiny lights and black rivers. John, covered in oil, runs up the many stairs of his remodelled house, smashing imps left and right with single blows from the WRINKLEFUCKER and directing the SASSACRUSHER with the GHOST GAUNTLETS to take on the ogres. When he reaches the top, he slams his hammer down one last time and bounces upwards to the spirograph portal, entering whatever’s on the other side. Fade to white.

Generally, a very good flash! Exciting but doesn’t sacrifice useful information for drama, and now two characters have reached their current goals but more is still going on. Lovely music too. I think the Flash animations are one of Hussie’s greater strengths here.

FAILURE ARTIST: The animation was what drew me into Homestuck and this is a particularly good one.

CHEL: A couple of static pages wrap up the Act; we pan out from John’s house to see it and the pinnacle it’s perched on are now looming above the same dark-blue land covered with thick clouds that the book fell onto, which we now see is in fact an entire very small planet. Curtains close.

So that’s the end of Act 3! What does everyone think?

FAILURE ARTIST: It was fun seeing Jade and the Exiles but sad thinking about how underutilized they ended up. Especially poor AR.

BRIGHT: This is where the elaborate time loops really started to kick in, and I’ve gotta say, I’m not a fan. I recognise that they’re a key feature of Homestuck, but I found some of them too confusing on my first read through. (Though they do make more sense on subsequent reads.)

I think on the whole this Act is quite well paced. I really loved the bits with Jade, and a lot of nifty background info gets introduced without being infodumped.

TIER: I wasn't even aware that webcomics on the internet were a thing at this point, but I do believe that it's around here that Homestuck's popularity was starting to pick up, no? This chapter went a lot deeper into the strangeness of the game to!

FAILURE ARTIST:

Homestuck was popular but I don’t think it became a phenomenon until Act 5 when the trolls were fully introduced. Lots of people even skipped Acts 1-4 and the Intermission to get to them. I think a lot of the pre-Act 5 fans were my age (20s) while after that many were teens or tweens. Admittedly, I didn’t do much in the fandom except check the SA thread until Act 5 came around.

CHEL: I don’t think I got into it until Act 6 - I remember the first time I got further than a few pages in I gave up when the Alpha kids got introduced because it was way too complicated.

As for my thoughts on the act, well… Before, I was able to more or less chalk up the racist/sexist/fatphobic/homophobic remarks as being from the characters’ mouths (they are, after all, twelve to thirteen years old) and not the author’s, but they don’t really get called out by the narrative and Hussie has sufficiently drained my goodwill that I have to complain, and I suspect after recent events that it actually was him speaking there, if you get my meaning. Most of the dialogue is still as sweet and funny as I remember it being but those bits really taint it. Hypothetical rewrite would definitely remove those.

I’m in two minds about keeping Dave’s hurricane of euphemisms to AT for said hypothetical rewrite; on one hand, considering his home situation, it’s worrying, but on the other the whole point of the joke is to make AT uncomfortable and it’s hard to do that without making comments that would also make the reader uncomfortable. Maybe if Dave’s home life was adjusted a bit the reader would be more easily able to assume he just picked them up from Urban Dictionary.

Speaking of Dave, his storyline here is where we really start to see a thing which is a recurring problem with the comic. Namely, reliance on theme and symbolism over what is actually happening. If Hussie was indeed trying from the beginning to portray Dave’s situation as serious abuse, then he shouldn’t have chosen to represent said abuse with ridiculous cartoon physics while literally portraying Dave as unharmed onscreen. Dave’s behaviour does hint at some issues, but they’re easy to pass off as related to other things, and swords so sharp they cause printed pictures to change are not most readers’ first assumption for the cause.

Other than those, though, I think we’re still mostly fine; none of the problems are problems with the underlying structure of the story, so it wouldn’t require a huge retooling. That state of affairs will continue on for another couple of acts, but when it fails, it fails.

COUNTS ALL THE LUCK: 0 ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 13 CALL CPA PLEASE: 7 CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 14 GET ON WITH IT!: 13 GORE GALORE: 0 HOW NOT TO WRITE A WEBCOMIC: 14 HURRY UP AND DO NOTHING: 6 IN HATE WITH MY CREATION: 0 RELATIONSHIP GOALS?: 1 SEND THEM TO THE SLAMMER: 0 SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS: 0 WHAT IS HAPPENING??: 2 WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 9 TOTAL: 79

[homespork-review]

Homespork Act 3: Insane Mindscrew Haymakers (Part 1)

BRIGHT: Before Act 3 proper starts, we see a message from Nanna to John, written in the front of the Sassacre’s joke book from Dad’s safe. The message is somewhat bizarre. For one thing, according to Nanna, the book it’s written in will end its journey on the day she dies...and still carry on for a while. For another, it talks about game elements we’ve encountered already, and hints at more to come. Overall it’s a nice bit of detail, enough to whet the reader’s interest.

You are no doubt reading this as a handsome and strapping young man! Why, the mangrit needed to lift the book is itself a sign of your maturity, not even to speak of the wisdom needed to grasp the nuance of Sassacre's time-tested mischief. I am so proud of you, grandson! How I wish I could have delivered this heirloom to you in the flesh. But I am afraid it wasn't in the cards! For you see, John, like you, this book must yet take a journey! Its journey will end on the Final Day of my life, and even then will continue some. Though I suppose that will be up to your Father. Perhaps he will discuss it with you one day, when he and you are ready. But it is your journey I am writing about to wish you luck! There will come a day when you will be thrust into another world. And once you arrive, that is only the beginning! You will soon delve even deeper into a realm of Warring Royalty in a Timeless Expanse. A realm of Agents and Exiles and Consorts and Kernelsprites. Of toiling Underlings and slumbering Denizens. A realm where four will gather, the Heir of Breath and Seer of Light, the Knight of Time and Witch of Space, and together they will Ascend. John, if only you knew how important you were! I regret my passing came so early in your life. And yet I feel in my heart we have already met. But what I know for sure is that we will meet again! Until then, John, I do hope your Father keeps you well fed!

FAILURE ARTIST: As I said earlier, Hussie has artfully defaced books, including one antique one about an expedition around the world. Defaced books show up again in this comic.

CHEL: Particularly, it implies that Nanna also had knowledge of the game during her lifetime, somehow, and refers to the gathering of four heroes. This is our first introduction to the classpect system, which now rivals Hogwarts houses as a method of personality description in fandom at large. I think at the time I didn’t realise who it was referring to… Anyway.

Next, we officially meet GG, the fourth and final member of our gang, a “silly girl” with a cheery grin, sleeping in a greenhouse full of vegetables and spirograph-shaped flowers. Since she’s sleeping and can’t object, she’s referred to for a while as FARMSTINK BUTTLASS, but she’s way ahead of us; under her hand is a note admonishing the reader and declaring her actual name to be Jade Harley. I think she’s the cutest of the kids, myself - just seeing her first appearance makes me happy! All its weaknesses aside, Homestuck’s pretty great at creating painfully cute character designs and attaching a good range of personalities to them.

FAILURE ARTIST: Jade Harley was considered a “Mary Sue” when she was first introduced. I don’t know why. Yeah, she has a lot of eccentricities and unusual possessions but so do the other characters.

Farmstink is a reference to an old comic Hussie did about this dude obsessed with the stink of farms. Hussie’s early work is really weird.

CHEL: The reader attempts to wake Jade by dropping a pumpkin carved with an animal’s face on her head, but the pumpkin disappears; as we know, WV now has it. Fortunately for the pacing, Jade wakes up on her own. Look closely, and you’ll notice the symbol on her shirt changes each page; that turns out a bit later to be due to her hi-tech WARDROBIFIER. If I recall correctly, Hussie intended to settle on one chosen by reader vote, but ended up on a cycle of three different ones.

FAILURE ARTIST: Jade settles on three icons to appear on her shirt. However, eventually just one icon stays on her shirt. The WARDROBIFIER doesn’t get much use with her, though a later character has the same thing.

CHEL: Jade is also wearing COLORFUL REMINDERS on her fingers, and when the view pans out it’s revealed by the view from the window that her GARDEN ATRIUM is on a high floor. She plays the flute badly for a while in a Flash game; apparently it’s not her preferred instrument. Also fortunately for the pacing, we think, she knows how to use her sylladex, and prefers to set its retrieval function in the form of a memory game because you seem to have a knack for always guessing right on the first try! On checking her reminders, she remembers to wish John happy birthday, gathers some fruit, and heads upstairs by means of a teleporter.

Jade’s bedroom proves to be full of various disturbing-looking plushies, albeit not nearly as disturbing as the Smuppets, hanging baskets and potted plants, a bass guitar, and G-rated furry artwork, including a piece obviously drawn by Dave. Franchises depicted in her toy and poster collections include GREEN SLIME GHOST (the apparent copyright-friendly source of John’s T-shirt and pogo ride), MANTHRO CHAPS (mustachioed human faces on plush animal bodies), and SQUIDDLES (adorable octopi with magnets in their bellies which stick together as Tangle Buddies!). Her favoured weapons are rifles, though she would never shoot an animal, and she has various gadgets on a worktable, including a thing that looks like a disconnected window not unlike those shown in Rose’s book, which she apparently hasn’t been able to get to work.

FAILURE ARTIST: Manthro Chaps is a reference to Hussie’s particularly disturbing set of comics where he plays around with anthropomorphization. Like having an anthro chicken man lay anthro eggs.

CHEL: The comic in question, Humanimals, can be found here; warnings for extreme body horror and general grossness.

FAILURE ARTIST: Jade is told by a forum prompter to Lose interest in fauna and never speak of it again. Jade refuses to in a beautiful little speech but she denies she’s a furry. Oh, if she only knew what was coming for her.

Jade looks out the window and we find out she lives somewhere next to a volcano.

CHEL: The very same one which appeared in the animation at the end of the last act, in fact.

Your grandfather is a WORLD RENOWNED EXPLORER-NATURALIST-TREASURE HUNTER-ARCHEOLOGIST-SCIENTIST-ADVENTURER-BIG GAME HUNTER-BILLIONAIRE EXTRAORDINAIRE. He has taught you everything you know.

Grandpa is heavily coded here and in his appearance a bit later as a Great White Hunter, an upper-class European guy who goes to faraway countries in order to shoot the animals there. Of course, non-white people can certainly do that, but white is what people will immediately picture upon seeing the trope. Also note we have another ridiculously wealthy family here. Since all four of the kids have now been introduced and we’ve had a lot of WSP points from their races and financial statuses already, here we get another HOW NOT TO point as well.

The Country Club Here every single character is white and middle-to-upper class. Unless your novel is taking place in rural Sweden, this will eventually give the reader the eerie feeling that some form of ethnic cleansing has taken place. HOW NOT TO WRITE A WEBCOMIC: 14 WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 7

One could argue that some form of ethnic cleansing is taking place, since these are the kids who are surviving the apocalypse, though that’s not actually fair because there are plenty of other SBurb sessions all across the world which might also succeed.

Jade opens her GADGET CHEST and produces several more items pertaining to her interests, including her computer, which she keeps in a Squiddles lunchbox. Several fortune-telling items are included among them, but according to Jade they are not the source of her abilities. The Magic 8-Ball is apparently usually wrong, responding to being asked whether it’s John’s birthday today with NOT EXACTLY, and the Magic Cue Ball is supposedly always right but is impossible to read, making it completely useless.

FAILURE ARTIST: There’s another Problem Sleuth reference (or rather Problem Sooth) but what’s important is the Magic Cue Ball. Unlike her Magic 8-Ball, it has no window where one can read the prediction. If only Jade had a special vision. Perhaps an eightfold vision.

Jade goes to feed BEC. She has some sylladex trouble until she finally just takes a steak out of her fridge.

CHEL: Once again, the sylladex shenanigans waste several pages.

GET ON WITH IT!: 9

Bec’s identity is as yet unknown, but recall that Dave called him a “devilbeast” in an earlier conversation, and when he suggested shooting Bec Jade said she didn’t think she could if she tried. He also apparently eats nothing but steaks (lucky Grandpa’s a billionaire), so Jade is living on an island with apparently minimal supervision from her guardian and an allegedly dangerous carnivore running wild outside. Like Dave, at this point it seems to be very lucky she’s a cartoon character.

FAILURE ARTIST: Using a special oven she irradiates the steak. Umm, I think Bec can take that but I worry about Jade.

Jade finds and plays her elaborate bass and she’s much better at it than with the flute. During the flash, the camera pulls out and we find out where she lives: in a tower on a small volcanic island with a frog temple in the lagoon. An airplane goes by and drops a package.

Jade uses her super high-tech “lunchtop” to have a conversation with John. Nothing special about that but we see on her chumroll a bunch of unfamiliar handles. Hmm.

CHEL: The unfamiliar handles are listed in the “Trollslum”, which one presumes is a blocklist. I think you have to see just how hi-tech the lunchtop is:

"Jade: Get down to business." (Watch on YouTube)

Hussie’s really coming into his own with the animations by now.

FAILURE ARTIST: Dave has sent her some messages begging her to wake up and unfortunately one line has the f-slur in it.

CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 7

In the end, he decides she’ll probably forget what he says.

CHEL: Begging her to wake up” doesn’t exactly cover it.

TG: youre asleep again arent you TG: or do you even know if you are TG: i still dont know how that works TG: its like nothing means anything

Apparently Jade sometimes talks to him while she’s sleeping.

FAILURE ARTIST: There’s a little flash where you can listen to some of Dave’s tunes. When you’re done with that, you can join her in looking at mspadventures.com. A crude John wearing a wizard hat is sitting on his lawn with the caption

It begins to dawn on you that everything you just did may have been a colossal waste of time.

What the hell is going on here? Is Jade reading what John is doing right now?

CHEL: I think it’s just a fourth wall joke, but it’s certainly accurate, considering our GET ON WITH IT count.

FAILURE ARTIST: Next, we get this flash called Midnight Crew: Act 1031. If you are watching it in 2019, the song playing is Dead Shuffle by Mark Hadley. However, the song was originally Nightlife by Bill Bolin. Unfortunately, Bolin had a dispute with Hussie over Hussie using music that Bolin considered WIP. Bolin blew up and called Hussie “unprofessional” and in a very professional move posted a photo of himself giving the double deuce. It’s a shame this happened since Nightlife is a jauntier and more appropriate tune.

CHEL: The Midnight Crew, to be specific, are gangsters with card-themed names who bear a striking resemblance to WV, living in a mysterious purple city full of towers, pitted against the Felt, another gang of odd-looking green fellows who wear bowler hats with numbers on them, in the colour schemes of a set of pool balls.

Hussie did make reference in the previous page to a “weird tangential intermission [which] clearly advanced the plot in no way whatsoever”, implying that it actually is relevant, and the purple city and its shiny black beady-eyed inhabitants look very familiar, but since as far as we know at this point the Midnight Crew is just a comic-within-a-comic, you know which counts get added to.

GET ON WITH IT!: 10 WHAT IS HAPPENING??: 2

Just for the record, the leader of the gang is named Spades Slick, and yes, we’re aware that “spade” is a slur against black people, which makes it slightly unfortunate to be applied as a name to a black-shelled alien creature. However, we’re not counting that as PROBLEMATYKKS because Hussie and the Crew’s original writer certainly did not intend that. It’s not that commonly used a term from what I’ve seen, the playing cards would be the more likely immediate association, and with the other characters being Clubs Deuce, Hearts Boxcars, and Diamonds Droog, it’s just an unfortunate coincidence. If he was a black human, then I’d object more strenuously.

FAILURE ARTIST: Jade talks with Dave (I think the conversation is a repeat?)

CHEL: Yep.

GET ON WITH IT!: 11

FAILURE ARTIST: Finally, we get the flash we’ve been waiting for: Dave strifes with his mysterious guardian. Or rather, he strifes with Lil Cal while Bro is a speed blur.

BRIGHT: Unlike the other strifes up to this point, the reader can’t do anything other than watch, because Bro slices the command box in half right at the start.

TIER: In the world of Homestuck, the parental units are overall just really weird! Like dad Egbert severe overabundance of cakes and mom Lalonde's drunken dysfunction. It's overall all hilarious, fitting with the tone and humor of the story well!

But then we have our lovely outlier. The one, the hated, The. Bro “a huge bastard honestly” Strider! A.K.A basically the one guardian whose questionable parenting gets the Real Consequences treatment later on in this tale. Peculiar that.

CHEL: Now, under most circumstances, an adult man beating the hell out of a barely-teenage kid, on the precarious rooftop of a high-rise building no less, would be horrifying. However, Bro chooses to hit Dave with his puppet, which… is frankly hard to take seriously. Obviously it would still hurt if a real person did that, but it looks so stupid that the immediate assumption is that it’s a joke.

BRIGHT: Particularly when earlier strife moves like Rose’s ‘Empty Suicide Threat’ were intended to be humorous. This is about on the same level as that, in terms of severity!

TIER: Being smacked around by the flopping noodle limbs of a freaky puppet is honestly hard to take seriously. Hell, this entire sequence is chock full of outlandish “Rule of Cool” bullshit and I am Peeved that I was apparently supposed to look at this sequence of ridiculous events and go “OBVIOUSLY THIS IS FUCKED UP AND ABUSIVE”.

ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 7

CHEL: I could kinda see that with hindsight from the rest of the comic, but definitely not “OBVIOUSLY THIS IS A LOT MORE FUCKED UP AND ABUSIVE THAN THE OTHER AWFUL FAMILY CIRCUMSTANCES”, which is what was apparently intended. And we also get another HOW NOT TO point, which we’ll give now even though the official “reveal” comes much later.

A Novel Called It - wherein an abusive parent exists Bad parents are everywhere in unpublished fiction. Whole cities of abusive fathers and sneering mothers live in the pages of books that can’t be sold. While occasionally, and notably in the horror genre, this sort of material can be made good (Carrie, V. C. Andrews), most cruel parents in fiction are just as much fun as they are in real life. HOW NOT TO WRITE A WEBCOMIC: 14

That damn puppet gets creepier every time, admittedly, more so now that Bro is moving so fast that the thing appears to be dancing on Dave’s head under its own power. Dave’s expressions look more annoyed than afraid or hurt, however, in my opinion.

FAILURE ARTIST: Anyway, we go back to Jade. Rose is pestering her.

TT: I require a font of frighteningly accurate yet infuriatingly nonspecific information. TT: Do you know where I can find a wellspring of this sort?

Very business-like, isn’t it? Rose and Jade’s relationship is a big missed opportunity in this comic. They’re more like friends-of-friends than friends.

CHEL: I don’t know, that sounds to me like how Rose talks to the boys too; facetiously formal. Still, they don’t converse nearly as much as the boys do with each other or them. Male writers in particular tend to do this, and it’s not entirely their faults. People are socialised to think women talk a lot more than they do, so he probably didn’t notice.

TIER: A real shame honestly, we were fucking robbed of some peak interactions between a sunshine flower child and a “dark and brooding” baby goth. Fucking. Robbed.

FAILURE ARTIST: We find out that Jade was the one who had the idea of playing Sburb. She had told Rose that the game would answer some of Rose’s unnamed questions. Rose wants more information on this Big Day. Jade says the game will not be what Rose thinks it is and will answer questions Rose hasn’t thought of yet. On that mysterious note, Jade says goodbye.

CHEL: We check in briefly with Rose in the present, confirming that she’s found the secret passage and is escaping the fire, bringing the corpse of her cat along with her, then to John, who is doing much worse. The ogres (the giant tusked imps) have cornered him, and while he flails frantically about with his Pogo Hammer it doesn’t do much good. They beat the snot out of him with the old Sassacre book and the tire swing, then send him flying into the abyss; fortunately, Nannasprite is able to catch him on his bed and provide healing, allowing him to flail uselessly at the ogres again and get beaten up again, ad infinitum.

Back in the desert, a giant worm-like creature emerges from PM’s bunker and chows down on the cart full of mailboxes. PM is displeased, and puts a hand on the hilt of an ornate black sword.

Cut back to the FAQ, which John has found time to edit with information about the punch card system. He doesn’t know if anyone is left alive to play the game, but Rose asked him to add to it, so he will. He’s figured out with his 133t h4x0r 5k1llz that the captcha code on the back of the cards is converted into a binary-based pattern on the cards, 0 being blank and 1 being a punched hole. Overlapping the cards functions like a bitwise AND operation, causing both to be enacted. The 48-hole card system allows for 300 trillion combinations, but John lampshades the fact that this couldn’t possibly cover every conceivable captchable item, and that various combinations of overlapping cards would just produce the same combination. This is just adding to my conviction that the system ought to be reworked; the totems alone would probably allow for a much wider range, if one gets down to the atomic level of their shape. Then again, those would be a lot harder to merge… Still, I’m sure there’s some way to work it.

BRIGHT: This section was kind of surprising to me because up to this point we haven’t had much if any description of John being into coding, so the section came out of left field somewhat. Not bad, necessarily, just jarring.

CHEL: Actually, he did mention in his intro that he likes to program, albeit not very well, he had some coding books on his shelves, and the icons on his computer are named in a way which implies they’re some of his attempts at coding. However, this interest never really comes up again later that I remember.

Meanwhile, the secret passage Rose followed led to her mother’s laboratory, which bears the logo “SN” with a stylised atom and a spirograph pattern in the loops of the S. It seems Mom Lalonde knows more than she’s letting on about the game. Inside the laboratory is an enormous HUBGRID of devices into which the laptop can be plugged.

FAILURE ARTIST: Rose uses that ol’ r-slur when she says she won’t go on the pad so that’s another point.

CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 8

CHEL: Jade uses the TRANSPORTALIZER to travel most of the way down to the ground floor, but not all the way down because the one on that floor is blocked. As she walks down the last couple of flights of stairs, we see Grandpa’s own collections of stuff; taxidermised animal heads, suits of armour, mummified corpses (made by pasting in photographs to the cartoon background, it’s creepy as hell), and his BLUE BEAUTIES, or the DAUGHTERS OF ECLECTICA; sun-bleached portrait photographs of beautiful women. On the final floor, we are confronted with the thing blocking the final portal; a gigantic preserved monster with a white head and green serpentine body. It took me till just now to figure it out but I think the white part is supposed to be a human torso on the snake tail; at first it just looked like a snake wearing a stocking mask. That’s what happens when the humans don’t have arms.

Jade thought she had logged off from Pesterchum, but suddenly it pings again, and here we are introduced to an entirely new section of the cast. We’re probably not spoiling anything by not being mysterious about them at this point in the fandom’s history, but just in case, we’ll stick to doing the reveals when the comic does. The person talking to Jade is one of the names from her TROLLSLUM, under the handle carcinoGeneticist; they gloat about being “BETTER AND SMARTER THAN YOU, FOREVER” when asked how they’re still contacting Jade after being blocked, and mock her about today being “FINALLY THE DAY YOU FUCK EVERYTHING UP”. Angry, Jade blocks them again.

FAILURE ARTIST: I had forgotten that “they” appeared so early.

CHEL: Well, “appear” is stretching it; the TROLLSLUM only make contact through Pesterchum for a while yet. And when they show up, we’ll have both plenty of skilfully-written points to pick out and plenty of counts to apply.

[homespork-review]

Homespork Act 2: The Racism of the Conductor’s Baton (Part 5)

TIER: Meanwhile, minutes in the future, a new character wanders about the desert wasteland. A PEREGRINE MENDICANT.

CHEL: This character resembles WV, except plain white in colour and noticeably taller, also wrapped in rags and pushing what appears to be a shopping trolley full of mailboxes.

WV heads for the passageway outside, the door to the bunker slamming shut behind him and glowing with a touchscreen; interacting with that causes the antechamber to spin around and a door to open into a new room, containing more computers. One of the two screens depicts Earth, while the other shows four spirographs orbiting around a fifth spirograph, with one set of two dots (one large, one small) next to the centre and another set of dots outside the orbit range. Looks familiar? A smaller screen below shows coordinates and times.

The room also contains a meter stick, which WV considers combining with his knife (really a strip of rusty metal) and a strip of rag to form a spear, but he hasn’t got his knife with him, and a bizarre contraption which looks like a ray gun pointing at a circular platform. When WV presses the big blue button on the console, the machine is proved to be an APPEARIFYER, which produces a pumpkin apparently out of thin air. Closer examination proves it to have taken the pumpkin from the coordinates entered on the console; there is a symbol carved on the pumpkin in the shape of what appears to be a pointy-eared animal’s face.

WV experiments a bit more with the machine, successfully summoning his knife back and using it to cut open the pumpkin (we are spared the apparently gruesome sight of him devouring the innards messily). The spirograph switch is immovable without a key. WV is also able to rescue the firefly from within the amber chunk, and this being a cartoon the firefly is miraculously alive and very happy about this! Awww.

TIER: The APPEARIFYER seems to be capable of grabbing thing from anywhere and anywhen, as long as doing so doesn't create a time paradox of all things. Attempting to do so causes the machine to activate a failsafe that turns whatever someone tried to get into a pile of paradox slime.

CHEL: With seconds to spare and dramatic music playing, WV appearifies the grate over the entrance to provide himself with an exit route, then scrambles around cramming all his cans and equipment into the hollow pumpkin, much to the consternation of the firefly, now named Serenity (of course). Frantically, he rushes up the ladder towards outside and safety… only to slip and fall back down at the last second, cans landing all over him, cutting to a scene reading “PSYCHE?” The next page states simply “UNPSYCHE”, the text beneath declaring a failure of the rare and highly dangerous 5X CLIFFHANGER COMBO, and we lead into another animation.

WV makes it to the top of the ladder just as the countdown finishes. Fortunately, the explosion doesn’t kill him; instead, it turns out to be the starting of rocket engines which propel the entire bunker into the air, setting it flying westward. Cut to John’s suburb, noted to be A CONTINENT WESTWARD AND YEARS IN THE PAST (BUT NOT MANY), where a meteor plummets to Earth, destroying all life and construction around it. Wind fills up the crater with soil again and a large white tree sprouts in its centre over a time period then revealed to be the years between its destruction and WV’s arrival.

Meanwhile, Peregrine Mendicant pushes their cart full of mailboxes along in the desert, oblivious to the bunker which is heading right overhead. WV observes, and the camera pans out to show PM’s outside another bunker with the same green house symbol on it. AN OCEAN WESTWARD AND YEARS IN THE PAST, but not “not many” this time, a spirograph opens up in space, shooting out a meteor, which crashes beside an active volcano. Millennia pass; the volcano dies, the crater fills up with greenery, and a tall building of green stone with a frog statue on the top is erected by unseen beings. As water levels rise, the building is covered almost completely and the volcano becomes an ocean island. Pterosaurs fly past, so we can presume the building was not made by humans.

Cut to Rose, cornered by the fire, frantically hitting and screaming at the generator until a flaming tree falls, shattering the generator and forcing Rose to leap to safety - or not safety, as the fire is still surrounding her. Mom Lalonde observes from the window of the house and presses a button on a keypad, opening up a secret passage in the mausoleum, leading downwards.

In a mysterious purple tower, Dad Egbert is handcuffed and hurried along by two imps, until he breaks free of the cuffs and attacks with cake and shaving cream. (If you pay close attention, you'll discover the cuffs were the trick ones from John's chest, according to another reader - I never did notice.) Atop another tower, this one Dave’s apartment building, Dave faces down Bro and Cal under a bright orange sky, and we finally see Bro Strider in non-silhouette. He bears a striking resemblance to the photo of the GameBro writer, right down to the popped collar. I don’t know if he’s actually supposed to be said writer, though.

Finally, WV’s flying bunker comes to a gentle stop in the middle of another desert, and he finds himself at the foot of a third tower, this one the remains of the frog-topped building, the ocean now long dry. The animation ends, and the curtains close on Act 2.

Now this is how to get across a lot of information fast! Much better. Very little text needed (in fact, what is there might not be strictly necessary, though it’s useful for immediately parsing what’s shown), no messing about. It’s a sharp improvement over sylladex shenanigans.

Okay, what do you guys think of Act 2? What does it do better than Act 1, or worse? Do you think it’s doing a good job of storytelling?

TIER: The pacing has improved.

CHEL: Technically speaking there are more instances of GET ON WITH IT (five to Act 1’s three), but this act is also longer and some of those instances were unnecessary single pages and not endless faffing about like in Act 1, so yes, that’s getting better. I think Hussie now knows better where his plot is going, and I don’t know if he originally did in the early stages of Act 1, so he’s better able to stick to a route to the goal.

FAILURE ARTIST: It is interesting seeing Rose’s and Dave’s home situation in light of later developments. I don’t think Hussie intended any deep commentary on child abuse when he wrote those scenes. I think it was edgy humor.

I hadn’t paid much attention to Rose’s FAQ or Sassacre’s book and I am disappointed by the racism in the excerpts. Worse, I know Hussie reuses the ethnic wedding metaphor later.

But on a positive note, the walkabout game is a cool new use of the medium.

BRIGHT: There’s a lot more meat to this act. More things happen, we get introduced to some of the background characters and find out more about how the game is set up. We also have more characterisation, which is a definite plus.

CHEL: So, for our hypothetical rewrite, removing the racism is obvious. “Edgy” humour was in at the time of writing, but even with that excuse, this is icky. It doesn’t really have the self-awareness of the awfulness of, say, Something Positive, it’s just a guy saying offensive things and it’s not quite clear how aware he is that they’re offensive.

Also obvious is removing the redundancy. I’d also add in a better reaction for John learning that Earth is doomed. I considered possibly moving that part of the reveal to a later point when it could be explored a bit more, but it does work nicely as a wham line with little info given yet. Also, figure out what the fuck we should be going for with Rose’s and Dave’s parental figures and stick to it. I could certainly see it being possible to lull the reader into falsely thinking of awful situations as funny in context and slowly revealing ways it fucked the kids up as we go, but in HS it’s handled clumsily, and there’s far too much going on already for an idea like that to have space to do it justice, I think. Oh, also, if John’s dream sequence was necessary, I’d have had it with him being knocked out, not just randomly deciding to nap while still surrounded by monsters. That was just kind of weird, especially since his friend is still in danger at that point.

Anything else you all can think of, readers? I don’t think we have any huge holes in the plot yet or anything. It’s certainly still much better than most of the works sporked here, but we'd appreciate it if you point out anything we missed.

COUNTS ALL THE LUCK: 0 ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 6 CALL CPA PLEASE: 2 CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 6 GET ON WITH IT!: 8 GORE GALORE: 0 HOW NOT TO WRITE A WEBCOMIC: 13 HURRY UP AND DO NOTHING: 3 IN HATE WITH MY CREATION: 0 RELATIONSHIP GOALS?: 0 SEND THEM TO THE SLAMMER: 0 SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS: 0 WHAT IS HAPPENING??: 1 WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 6 TOTAL: 45

[homespork-review]

Homespork Act 2: The Racism of the Conductor’s Baton (Part 4)

BRIGHT: Even having lived in this all his life, Dave nearly gives himself a serious injury launching stuff out of his sylladex. This is a bit more nerve-wracking than John launching PDAs and towels out of the window.

TIER: I'm personally amazed that he hasn't lost any bits to improper handling of fireworks. That shit can really fuck someone that doesn't know what they're doing up, especially a small kid is at risk of losing some fingers.

CHEL: Particularly when he disposes of them in the garbage disposal - that in itself would probably be okay if one soaked the fireworks in the sink but the blades could possibly cause a spark with the metal filings in the firework… I don’t know if that’s possible but the fact that he chooses to dispose of fireworks that way implies to me that he doesn’t know how to safely handle them. I wouldn’t risk it that way myself.

TIER: Realistically the Strider home is just a huge accident waiting to happen, between all the dangerous stuff just out in the open and strewn about in precarious spots and the fetish puppets piled all over.

CHEL: Speaking of which, Dave notices “HELLO DAVE” written in sloppy bright red inside a jigsaw-piece outline on the crawlspace hatch. Dave knows it’s a mind game but opens the hatch anyway, spilling out a huge pile of Smuppets which completely envelops him. It is from here he sent his previously-seen rant to Rose. Which of course we now have to read again…

GET ON WITH IT!: 8

Now, I must mention here that, in most works, the random jumping around in time would be a count of its own for me. I hate it when that happens, it’s unnecessarily confusing. However, there is an ongoing theme of time, time-travelling, and changing timelines in Homestuck, so it at least serves to introduce us to that.

A note pinned to the hatch with a batarang reads thusly, in mismatched fonts/colours, reading eerily as if two people were writing:

bro. roof. now. bring cal. where doing it man where MAKING THIS HAPEN

At least Bro encourages Dave’s writing project, as that latter part is a SBaHJ reference.

I think we all wanted to see Dave take out some frustration on those things.

Back to John, after making a little fort with the cruxite dowels and bedsheets, he uses the Totem Lathe to make the “totems” of various item codes. As I mentioned above, I feel like this is an unnecessary step in the creation process. Why not just have a way to enter the code directly into the Alchemiter? Anyway, Rose uses the previously-useless “Shale” stash to create some more captchalogue cards, increasing John’s inventory size, and recreate the pogo ride and hammer lost to the punched cards. A randomly-entered code produces a rocket pack with a violin, cinderblock, and flower pot halfway merged inside it, leaving it unusable for its intended purpose but heavy enough to kill imps.

John looks through a copy of “Harry Anderson: Wise Guy” by Mike Caveney, encountering the hole-in-the-ace, or “A-Hole”, card trick. Silly name given here aside, it’s a real trick and the way shown is really how you do it. It gives John an idea, and he overlaps two punched cards and uses them both together, creating this.

FAILURE ARTIST: John is smarter than people give him credit for.

CHEL: Yeah, on further examination I don’t think my assumption that he didn’t know who Obama was was being very fair to him. He’s certainly easily distracted, but I don’t think any of the various cast members can truly be described as stupid.

The Pogo Hammer works fine in that it allows him to kill an imp with a single blow, but it sends him and the pogo ride the imp was on flying in the process. Fortunately, Rose is able to move his bed quickly enough to catch him. Unfortunately, those larger monsters are still slowly approaching… Exactly how fucking slowly do these things move? It’s not like the distance they have to cover is huge in proportion to their bodies.

John asks Rose why she can’t just lift the bed up to the gate with him on it, but the game doesn’t allow for that - Rose guesses it’s considered cheating. Against Rose’s advice, John decides to nap, lulled by the hypnotic spirograph of the gate, while Rose experiments with the alchemy system. Deciding to sleep while still surrounded by imps adds to our count again:

HURRY UP AND DO NOTHING: 3

If he has time to nap, he ought to have time to emotionally react, too.

We see Rose in the mausoleum again, the fire getting closer and closer in the window, sparks of firelight flickering around her. Concerned that Dave isn’t helping her, she checks the SBurb server CD for a code to send to John so he can be her server player instead, but it has no code. Outside, the generator overheats and blows, and Rose’s laptop finally shuts down.

Another animation shows what is presumably, and is later confirmed to be, John’s dreams. From a spirograph in a clear blue sky emerge clouds, which take on the forms of John’s dad’s face and various items such as the green ghost, a birthday cake, and a harlequin, the largest and final cloud coalescing into the silhouette of a long-haired girl about John’s age who is obviously not Rose; this, we can guess, is probably GG. This fades into quick flashes of spirographs and pumpkins, and John wakes, surprised, to find GG is messaging him.

TIER: GG once more hints at knowing more about what's happening (like the fact that John's dead nanna is around to give him advice), but is apparently waiting for a specific time to say what exactly. Curiouser and curiouser.

BRIGHT: She also tells John that he needs to wake up. This sounds like a setup for an “It was all just a dream!” twist, but what she actually means is a lot weirder. It takes quite a while to get to that point, however!

TIER: Then there's a Fucking Huge Imp that's decided to impersonate King Kong and it is terrifying, who let this happen. We've got what looks like a boss battle brewing babes!

And then we cut back to Dave, who ascends to the roof with the demon puppet from somewhere worse than hell as instructed in a pretty dope looking and sounding flash. And with another sneak at his elusive as shit bro, we...

Get psyched, and then there's a new kid brought to our attention. Someone that looks quite a bit like the silhouette that showed up in John's little nap

And THEN

We get A Double Psycheout Combo as we go back to the Wayward Vagabond, who is not here for this Retrieve Arms running gag. What he is however is hungry, seeing as he scarfs down a rotten pumpkin between one frame and the next. He also doesn't have the ability to captchalogue stuff, so that's a thing he's got going for him.

Another thing to note is that he has some kind of barcode that brings back “unpleasant memories” he'd rather not think about. After getting some more cans (cans for days my dudes) he promptly declares himself the mayor of Can Town, there presumably being not much else to do while inside the room he's in. Dude seems fond of democracy, and quite obviously has issues with kings.

The guy seems to have an amusing (to me at least) thing about eating green things, nothing is safe. Not even uranium. And though the two green sticks have been munched, the rest of the chalk is used for its intended purpose. He doodles up a town layout, a chess board (with an assist from some motor oil), and then covers the walls in strange planets. A golden planet with a moon, four peculiar planets without anything orbiting them, and pretty separate from the rest a purple mirror to the golden planet. Damn dude this entire wall smells like foreshadowing.

We get a look at the strange screen thingy again, John's window still the only one showing anything, and WV is not familiar enough with whatever this contraption is to turn on the dead screens.

He the manages to accidentally bust out some kind of soda stash and it's like Christmas has come early in the bunker. It's like watching a kid get into the super sugary drinks.

CHEL: Specifically, it’s a reference to this, except it works: "The Simpsons- Homer's first day at work at Home!/" (Watch on YouTube)

TIER:

With that out of the way, we're back to the weird machine, which can show more than John apparently! The other screens are garbled though, especially screen three brings up so many questions. Like seriously what in the fresh hell is that, that right there is worthy of a round of “people not in the fandom explain what's happening”.

There's a countdown visible as well, spanning all four screens, and it gets more or less locked into that. WV then proceeds to shoot the shit for nearly four hecking hours, leaving 13 minutes to go on the countdown.

[homespork-review]

Homespork Act 1: The Note Dawdling Tension Plays (Part 3)

CHEL: John heads outside, finally, but finds the mailbox empty and the car locked with a package inside. It seems he’ll have to confront his father to get the game he seeks. And then, we get the internet equivalent of a splash page, with ominous wind chimes, slow-pan animation, and lyrical text.

You have a feeling it's going to be a long day.

Regarding the term “ominous”, it applies in ways Hussie intended, implying the strangeness to come, but also in ways he may not have. Notice anything absent from that animation? Go on, guess.

FAILURE ARTIST: John’s neighborhood is more bland than Privet Drive.

CHEL: True, but “character” wasn’t really what I meant. What would one expect to see at least one of, in a nice suburban neighbourhood, even a bland one, in the daytime, when we know John’s dad is home from work, even if through a window? What are we not seeing here?

FAILURE ARTIST: No people and not even any pets.

CHEL: Hot dog, we have a wiener. Not character, characters. There are no signs of life at all. Not even a wild bird. Now, John is the focal character here, so that might come under the heading of unnecessary detail, but considering what happens later, this becomes very creepy. The big dangerous thing has not happened yet, so there should still be people in the neighbourhood, and the sound of wind chimes implies at least one of those houses is inhabited. But we don’t see them. Come to think of it, John never mentions his school at all, nor any other friends apart from the other kids featured in the comic, and nor do they. It’s as if they literally sprang into existence on that day and got plopped down in place just in time to be in the comic.

FAILURE ARTIST: Given that John is home in the middle of what would be a school day I think he might be home-schooled.

CHEL: That didn’t occur to me. I’m a Brit and I guess I was thinking “Easter break”, but the school year pattern in the US is different. But that raises further questions. Doesn’t he know any local kids? His dad works full-time and he has no other family - when does his dad find the time?

FAILURE ARTIST: Maybe it would be Spring Break in Washington State. I don’t know.

CHEL: Regardless, it’s eerie. If he’s home-schooled, he still ought to have some local friends or at least be on wave-hello terms with neighbours, unless he really is stuck in his bedroom almost all the time. I’m tempted to add an ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY point for the implication that John’s been raised locked in a room, but that’s just silly speculation so I won’t.

While on the topic, John does live in a literal suburb, but I’m not going to give points for WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM here. That count is for when the characters’ behaviour comes across as white/suburban/wealthy and that contradicts how the author is trying to present them. John is supposed to be the everyman figure with an ordinary life, living in a regular respectable town.

Let’s move on. It’s time to confront the Parental Figure.

TIER: John finds himself heading to the kitchen to retrieve his game, and it's now that we get a good look at his dad, along with one of the neat little details about Homestuck's world being brought to the forefront.

I am of course, talking about STRIFE!

"[S] John: Enter and Strife!" (Watch on YouTube)

The more or less fighting system for lack of my vocabulary, and seemingly a thing you just do in this world.

CHEL: John gets to actually use his “hammerkind” weapon, and Dad’s preferred method of combat is offering yet more cake.

FAILURE ARTIST: John threatens his father with a hammer. In the real world, this would be horrifying. But it’s not in this video game world. The other Beta Kids have “STRIFE” with their parents and in only one case does it end up as being treated seriously. Yet that will wait to be seen.

CHEL: One case which is significantly less disturbing than one of the other cases, in some ways. But yes, that’s for later. To be fair, John could have been trying to hit the cake with the hammer, not his dad, but most parents still wouldn’t be pleased to have their kids waving hammers in their direction regardless.

ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 2

TIER: After a short few rounds, John manages to properly distract his dad and successfully gets to his mail. A winner is you Johnny boy. Then we find ourselves with another hit of sylladex fuckery happening, joyous.

When we get back to John's room, it's pesterlog time, this time with a little sneak peak at the last of our fabulous foursome of thirteen years olds, gardenGnostic, or GG! They're only present for three short lines, but damn if they aren't pretty telling. From what little is seen they're an overall pretty chipper person, and to me at least adorable with those emojis.

CHEL: The beta’s finally in John’s hands, after all that effort to get it. So what do we do now? Why, it seems like a great time to go waste some time reading an entirely different imaginary webcomic promoting Hussie’s other work! Though, to be fair, the Midnight Crew will turn out to be relevant later. Keep that name in mind.

FAILURE ARTIST: The Midnight Crew actually started as the OCs of Problem Sleuth fan Mayonka who paid to have a extra episode.

CHEL: And then, FINALLY, he installs the thing, and it... gives us a loading page, and he goes off to read up on data structures and fuck about with his fucking sylladex some more!

TIER: The sylladex thing really knows how to wear its welcome thin with the shenanigans, thought I'll admit that John getting a razor embedded into the face of one of his posters was amusing in how dangerous the dang thing can be.

GET ON WITH IT!: 3

"Get on with it! (Monty Python)" (Watch on YouTube)

CHEL: Because I’m feeling bitter, I’m adding another point too!

HOW NOT TO WRITE A WEBCOMIC: 5 The Lost Sock - wherein the plot is too slight Here the main conflict is barely adequate to sustain a Partridge Family episode. Remember that this drama has to carry the reader through 300-odd pages. The central dilemma of a novel should be important enough to change someone’s life forever.

Our main plot hasn’t been introduced yet, so as far as the reader knows, what’s happening now is the plot. Getting a video game out of the kitchen should not take this long and is not much of an epic adventure! By now, Hussie’s committed almost all of the sins listed in HNTWAN’s section on beginning a story! NOTHING IS HAPPENING!

Okay, something happens. It’s not plot, but it’s adorable. John opens the birthday present from Dave, to discover a souvenir of his favourite movie; the very stuffed bunny prop featured in Con Air. Look at how happy he is!

TIER: I do believe that up to this point, there hasn't been much of a plot, just people doing stuff. It's boring in the same way that someone telling you about an average day is, not much going on to be honest.

FAILURE ARTIST: I enjoyed reading Act 1 when I first read it but I was coming in under no expectation. Homestuck as a deep meaningful story hadn’t begun yet.

CHEL: Okay, NOW a thing is happening. The game is installed, on comes the loading page, and… Well, that’s peculiar. Now, at last, we see what the big deal with this game is. It permits TT, who installed the “server” section of the game while John installed the “client” section, to reach into his actual bedroom with the cursor and move things around, place bizarre-looking machinery in the rooms, or even add parts to his house a la The Sims. Now that’s a game worth the hype it got! Too bad it took almost 140 pages to actually reveal this.

The kids don’t seem very surprised by all this, yet the reviewer hadn’t heard the game could do that. One would think even such a disaffected dudebro would be curious about that, if he knew. Maybe the game really does have some kind of built-in failsafe to keep adults away?

FAILURE ARTIST: This is a world people have inventories instead of pockets and an RPG battle starts every time you argue with your parents.

CHEL: Does that apply to all people in it, though, or just the lead characters? They are, as it turns out, special already, and we never see a person who’s not involved.

John wants to try moving things around, but he needs the “server” CD-ROM to do so, which is still in the car. TT’s attempts to help result in not only a large machine called a “Cruxtruder” blocking the front door, but also the toilet, which John earlier accidentally filled with cake during sylladex shenanigans, being ripped out and dropped in the yard, and the bathtub similarly ending up in the hallway, which is pretty funny, I admit.

EB: you can see me, right. EB: tell me what is wrong with this picture.

Perhaps sylladex shenanigans could be trimmed without being deleted entirely. SBurb shenanigans, similarly, are funny but might possibly do better to be compressed into fewer pages, but that’s not as big a deal, I think. The shenanigans aren’t entirely TT’s fault; she keeps losing her internet connection due to bad weather. GG’s earlier mention of an explosion near their home implies that things are starting to happen around them, too. Meantime, John finds a sledgehammer, a much better weapon, the implication being he’s going to need one, even if he turns out to be unable to lift it. TT helps him to hit the Cruxtruder with it, and said machine produces a glowing… thing and starts a four-minutes-and-thirteen-seconds countdown. Countdowns are never good in this context.

The glowing thing is a Kernelsprite, which needs to be “prototyped”, so into it goes the harlequin doll, causing it to take on the shape of a harlequin’s head and hand. Attempts to use the mysterious machinery TT has deployed result in the production of a shiny blue cylinder called a cruxite dowel and three green cubes labelled by the game as Perfectly Generic Objects, using up the game’s abstract building currency dubbed Build Grist. Wasting time playing with the machinery proves to be an unwise idea, however, as John looks into the sky and sees…

Even worse than the meteor heading directly for his house, Dad is coming back!

FAILURE ARTIST: THIS is where I came in. It is the most impressive flash animation so far. It is still awkwardly animated compared to later ones.

CHEL: I think it’s one of his earlier efforts, so I wouldn’t say it was bad. It succintly gets the point across and it’s better animated than anything I could do.

John messages TT again.

EB: oh man who cares about the bathroom, now there's a meteor heading for my house!!! TT: I see. TT: Do you suppose it has anything to do with the game? EB: i don't know, maybe! what do i do! TT: I think it's very likely. TT: The walkthroughs vaguely suggest an impending threat before they end. TT: The already poorly constructed sentences become even more curt and ambiguous. TT: As if written hastily and with a sense of alarm. TT: Actually, their dedication to updating the walkthrough under such circumstances is admirable.

TT concludes that if the meteor is caused by the game, succeeding at a game objective must be the way to stop it, and investigates while John talks to TG, resulting in one of my favourite conversations in the comic, but also leading into another count.

EB: we'll talk later if i am still alive and the earth isn't blown up. TG: like the size of texas TG: or just rhode island TG: theyre always throwing around these geographical comparisons to give us a sense of scale like it really means anything to us TG: but its like it doesnt matter its always just like: WOW THATS PRETTY FUCKING BIG TG: like mr president theres a meteor coming sir. oh yeah, how big is it? its the size of texas sir TG: OH SHIT TG: or, how big is it? its the size of new york city sir TG: OH SHIT TG: sir im afraid the comet is the size of your moms dick TG: OH SNAP TG: sir are you familiar with jupiter TG: you mean like the planet? TG: yeah TG: well its that big sir TG: hmm that sounds pretty big TG: i have a question TG: is it jupiter? TG: yes sir, earth is literally under seige by planet fucking jupiter TG: OH SHIT TG: anyway later

I don’t know if TG is supposed to believe John here. If he is, then we get another count:

HURRY UP AND DO NOTHING: 1

FAILURE ARTIST: Hate to be a killjoy but the line about your mom’s dick is transphobic.

CHEL: My original intention with the PROBLEMATYKKS count was to point out cases where it wasn’t justified by the character saying it, so I wasn't going to count this. Thirteen-year-old boys trying to be witty say all sorts of awful bullshit. Though the writer’s old enough to know better and it didn’t ever get called out, so yeah, okay, I’ll expand the original intention.

CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 4

The rest of it’s still funny, though. Besides, I was more immediately concerned with the fact that TG seems remarkably unconcerned about the possible risk to his friend’s life. There isn’t really anything he could do about it even if he tried, obviously, but one would expect he’d at least say “oh shit, run!” or something. This will become a recurring pattern in the comic, as will be shown fairly soon, hence the DO NOTHING count.

FAILURE ARTIST: I think that conversation is also from real life. Hussie and a friend talked about meteor movie conventions and Hussie decided to use it. However, I assume during that conversation they weren’t threatened by an actual meteor.

CHEL: Possibly he’d have done better to make it clearer that TG did not believe John actually had a meteor heading for him. John is a known joker, after all. It would be quite easy, and I would have assumed that in a comic which had had fewer unremarked wacky happenings already.

Dad Egbert is also remarkably calm about the bathtub in the hallway. TT’s attempt to move it is foiled when her connection is lost, causing her to drop it in front of John’s bedroom door, trapping him inside. John is now on his own.

[homespork-review]

Homespork Act 1: The Note Dawdling Tension Plays (Part 1)

A young man stands in his bedroom. It just so happens that today, the 13th of April, 2009, is this young man's birthday. Though it was thirteen years ago he was given life, it is only today he will be given a name!

CHEL: Here we see the first page, and are introduced to our protagonist, ZOOSMELL POOPLORD! Sorry, I mean John Egbert. The joke names used as a running gag, and also the actual names which end up applied to the characters, were the suggestions of the players of the original forum game.

BRIGHT: Homestuck does start out strongly in several ways. It immediately establishes the protagonist and location. It sets the tone it will use, one based heavily on a text adventure computer game. It introduces the reader to the inventory system...

And here the first feature of Homestuck becomes apparent: although a hugely popular and widely known webcomic, it is very slow to get going. The new reader who arrives on the recommendation of others ends up scratching their head and wondering if they’re in the right place.

TIER: In ancient times (so somewhere in 2014/15) I actually attempted to read Homestuck to see what the occasional weird noises the name caused were going on about. I'm very certain that I didn't even make it to meeting any of the other kids I was so bored.

CHEL: Same here. It took me two or three attempts to get to that point. The problem is that the intro is left over from its days as a forum game, in which no one was expecting it to lead into the epic story it became. It worked great for that format, but less well now. And here we start on our first counts.

GET ON WITH IT!: 1 HOW NOT TO WRITE A WEBCOMIC: 2

How Not to Write a Novel lists multiple errors which could be said to apply here:

The Waiting Room - wherein the story is too long delayed Here the writer churns out endless scenes establishing background information with no main story in sight. On chapter 3, the reader still has no idea why it’s important to know about [the background info, in this case how badly John fails at using technology]. By chapter 7, the reader would be having strong suspicions that it isn’t important, were a reader ever to make it as far as chapter 7. Zeno’s Manuscript - in which irrelevant detail delays narrative momentum Any scene can be killed by description of every meaningless component of whatever action the character undertakes. As in Zeno’s Paradox, in which an arrow never reaches its target because it must always travel half the remaining distance, the reader begins to feel as if the end is further and further away.

A comic about a kid failing to master a video game inventory system is mildly amusing once, but not when it drags on this long, and it’s not particularly fitting for an epic adventure involving the fate of universes. Well, that’s not quite fair; introduction to mundane life and slow revelation of the magical goings-on works fine for books like the Harry Potter series. But, to take Philosopher’s Stone as an example, multiple different odd things happen over the course of Uncle Vernon’s regular boring day, increasing in scale until it’s very clear something strange is going on, and establishing multiple aspects of the wizarding world, e.g. owls, their fashion, the existence and disappearance of a mysterious villain, the fact that the wizarding world is supposed to be secret.

John fucking about with his sylladex and putting up movie posters for page after page doesn’t tell us anything new. Failing to use the sylladex once would be enough to get the point that magical video game inventories are a thing in this world and John’s not very good at using them across, and then we really ought to move on, and we can already see the posters on his walls so we don’t need to see him hanging more. Possibly we could have needed the latter in a purely text format where we couldn’t see the walls, or in a comic without text description at the bottom where attention would need to be drawn to them on-panel. Admittedly, it does establish him picking up the hammer, which becomes relevant, but we don’t need a full page each for both the action of him picking up the hammer and the action of him hanging the poster.

… Who hangs a poster with nails, anyway? His walls must be in a hell of a state.

For that matter, that’s another HNTWAN entry or two:

The Second Argument in the Laundromat - a scene which occurs twice NEVER use two scenes to establish the same thing. We do not, under any circumstances, want a series of scenes in which the hero goes to job interviews but fails to get the job, or has a series of unsuccessful dates to illustrate bad luck in love. This works in the movies, where three scenes can pass in thirty seconds, but not in a novel. The Redundant Tautology - wherein the author repeats himself If you have made a point in one way, resist the temptation to reinforce it by making it again. Do not reexpress it in more flowery terms, and do not have the character reaffirm it in dialogue […] This point is worth repeating; don’t reiterate. HOW NOT TO WRITE A WEBCOMIC: 4

Additionally, people with a lower tolerance for “lovable clumsy dork” characters are going to come to hate John before the comic’s even started, though it’s probably best that people who are going to hate the main character learn that quickly so they can leave. I can understand not wanting to lose the forum game which originally spawned the comic, the other people involved would probably not be pleased, but perhaps it would be better saved as a side story and trimmed down when the comic proper was released. At least they could be compressed down by showing multiple failures and multiple poster-hanging actions on single pages.

One other minor gripe might be the neologisms, such as “sylladex” meaning inventory. I found it fairly easy to pick up and it does make the tone and narration nicely distinctive, but it’s a level of extra complication. How Not to Write a Novel has a couple points on excessively baroque wordplay - do you guys think it’s worth giving it a point for that?

BRIGHT: Possibly not in this case - wordplay is a feature of HS and this one is at least made fairly clear. There are plenty of offenders later on as I recall though...

CHEL: Okay, seems fair. In this case it is more of a feature than a bug. It does establish the narrative voice and add to the video game theme. However, the movie posters also bring up an addition to our third count.

Plus, a black president? Now you’ve seen everything! WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 1

A reference to the song “White Suburb Impressionism”, by IAMX…

"IAMX - 'White Suburb Impressionism" (Watch on YouTube)

… this count goes up whenever characters behave in a way which suggests they’re, well, white and suburban (or wealthier), despite any attempts to present them otherwise. This would have passed without comment, but Hussie later tried to claim he’d always intended the kids to be “aracial”, so any reader could project themselves or their preferred headcanons onto the kids. As we’ll show you, we don’t believe him, or at least don’t believe he succeeded. That would probably be difficult to pull off, anyway. Race affects a lot more than features on a stylised sprite.

FAILURE ARTIST: Now, I can’t quite put my finger on it but John’s and Dave’s opinion on black presidents in movies (that it’s a gimmick ruined by Obama’s election) feels like something that would only come out of a white mouth i.e. Andrew Hussie’s. Not the most egregious case of implied whiteness but still worth noting.

CHEL: The point of the joke here is not 100% clear, and that’ll be a thing which comes up later as well. See, I agree that’s Dave’s opinion, but I thought the point was that John genuinely didn’t know there was a black president at the time of writing because he’s already been established to be not exactly a genius and so far he’s been focused on movies and video games instead of real life. Maybe I’m underestimating him, though, since admittedly not very much of him has been shown at this point and it’s been a while since I read the whole thing. I’m not going to start using the ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY count here, though, because here Hussie clearly was trying to be funny. It just isn’t clear to me what about it was supposed to be funny. That’s probably my autism talking, though. Jokes are hard. I agree that it sounds like a white kid’s opinion either way - even the dimmest black American kid would know Obama existed, and so most likely would non-black people of colour.

Anyway! Things pick up a bit when John, under the username ectoBiologist, starts chatting to the second character to be introduced, currently known as turntechGodhead, though the second topic of conversation is a reference to a 1989 movie which, as time goes on, will be familiar to fewer and fewer readers. Luckily, the writer realises this, and the content of the conversation makes the reference sufficiently clear without falling into As You Know dialogue.

FAILURE ARTIST: Namely, their conversation is about a scene where - pardon me for being gross but it’s in the comic - a character accidentally ingests urine instead of apple juice. John and TG are surprised the character knew it was urine but I find it weird that someone with working smell would not know what it is. Urine has a distinct odor.

CHEL: Well, be fair. According to the drawings, the characters in question don’t have noses!

FAILURE ARTIST: On a more pertinent note, this conversation is an edited version of one Hussie and a friend had. Perhaps Hussie was TG? TG is practically an Author Avatar for Hussie. Sure, Hussie literally appears in the comic later, but TG seems to fit his true personality better. We’ll see how that affects things for better or for worse.

BRIGHT: This is also the reader’s introduction to the Pesterlog. This is one of those things that seems like it should be out of place in a webcomic - it’s just a page of two people talking to each other in chatlog format, with no other information - but the Pesterlogs actually work surprisingly well.

FAILURE ARTIST: When I first read Homestuck, I didn’t know you had to click on the Pesterlog to open it. I just sat around wondering what amazing conversations they were having. I’m not the only one I think who made that mistake.

CHEL: Yeah, I think I briefly had the same problem, but I don’t remember for sure. Possibly more attention could be drawn to the button.

TIER: I would've probably ended up in the same boat if the friends that recommended I read Homestuck didn't specifically tell me not to accidentally overlook them!

CHEL: That’s not exactly a writing error, so I’m not sure it falls under our jurisdiction, but it’s a point that ought to be brought up. The Pesterlogs do work well once the reader actually sees them, anyway. It’s actually pretty interesting to see how much information can be conveyed in a conversation without falling into As You Know Bob. Let’s check what points are introduced in this first one, for example:

- John really loves what he got for his birthday, a Little Monsters poster. From this we know he’s not spoiled (this is how you do it, Meyer) and easily entertained, and likely has a good home life, as he’s so happy and grateful about a gift from his dad.

-turntechGodhead has apple juice in his closet. This establishes his odd home life, and gets explained in more detail later.

- Some things about the personalities of both kids. John is enthusiastic and a joker, TG is mellower, sarcastic, rambles a bit, and at least plays at being cool.

- John really wants to play the SBURB Beta, a game mentioned earlier which is late being released. TG is less keen, again trying to be cool about it.

- Said game got “slammed” by critics, despite the fact that we learned earlier from John’s SBURB-logo calendar that this game has been hyped to hell and back and must be popular, with merchandise and reviews being released before even the beta version of the game is out. Something weird is going on; someone really wants a lot of people to play this game.

Not bad considering a total lack of body language reference or narration. Das Sporking’s seen authors using traditional narration do worse!

FAILURE ARTIST: The (adult) critics of Game Bro get into shenanigans that prevent them from playing the game they reviewed. Perhaps there’s something in the game that prevents itself from being played by adults, just like how adults can’t pilot Evangelions in the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion.

CHEL: Not sure. Doesn’t one of Dad’s online friends play it, or at least get caught up in it, later on? Though that part’s obviously supposed to be a joke… Maybe instead it’s a built-in way to stop anyone who might be listened to warning others what it does?

As established earlier, said beta is late; this is a reference to the originally planned launch date of the comic, three days before it actually ended up being released. Also, there’s a pun you may have missed in the background. The programming files on John’s desktop include the phrase “^CAKE”. The ^ symbol is called a carot. Get used to noticing those. It’s pretty amazing how many references, self-references, puns, and recurring themes are worked in, and people such as revolutionaryduelist have made semi-careers picking them all out. We won’t bother with all of them or we’ll be here all century, but we’ll pick up on any obvious ones.

FAILURE ARTIST: Hussie majored in computer science so there’s lot of computer science in-jokes in the beginning.

BRIGHT: Something I just noticed: One of the other files on John’s desktop is ‘TYPHEUS’. It even has a Denizen icon! Probably something that has been brought up plenty of times before, but still nifty on a reread.

CHEL: Typheus and Denizens will come up later in the comic.

TIER: When he feels like it, Hussie is immensely good at foreshadowing later events in pretty subtle but solid ways. It's stuff like this that makes times when he does fumble look worse than they probably are in comparison.

[homespork-review]

Homespork Act 1: The Note Dawdling Tension Plays (Part 2)

BRIGHT: The next bit of narration continues to establish John’s character: he has no idea what to call the red arm on the mailbox, and doesn’t care. We also learn that much like many teenagers, he doesn’t want to spend hours with his Dad. The author uses this opportunity to drop in a reference to the title.

The next page has a loading screen! I think this is the first interactive page in the comic. (For a certain value of interactive - you can mouseover the vertical lines of the games in the CD rack, and the cover of the game will pop up. Some of these link you to other works by Hussie.)

CHEL: Unfortunately, we then go into sylladex shenanigans AGAIN. Mercifully, this time it’s brief. We’ll let this one go, but I’ve got one eye on you, Huss.

TG messages John again, making reference to “TT”, who is confirmed female and alleged to be “mackin on” TG, and to his “bro” who “basically knows everything and is awesome”. How sincere he is in either of those remains to be seen. Finally, John actually gets told how to use his sylladex. Maybe the shenanigans will stop now… Anyway, he selects hammers for his strife specibus, or his weapon of choice, and the sylladex is confirmed able to hold things which would be too big to carry normally, such as Colonel Sassacre's Daunting Text of Magical Frivolity and Practical Japery, a book roughly as big as John is. At least the stupid sylladex actually has some practical use - I’m sure John’s as happy as I am to know that!

Next we see the review which put TG off; GameBro magazine explains “Why the ‘Game of the Year’ or whatever isn’t as good as some other stuff I like that’s better”. As it turns out once you get past the Totally Radical verbiage, the reviewer didn’t even play it. Something suspect’s definitely going on if it’s so hyped up on so little information… erm, is it just me or is the term “Brotel Rwanda” rather tacky? I don’t know if that’s worth a point, the point of the joke could be that the game reviewer is an idiot…

FAILURE ARTIST: I’d have that squarely as a point.

CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 1

CHEL: Okay, then, here’s our fourth count. Title is a reference to a line later in the comic, and I think the point of the count is pretty obvious. Mileage may vary, all works would get at least a couple points in this, and I don’t think it’s a big problem unless/until it starts to climb out of proportion. Not gonna use a WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM count because the reviewer, as seen in the pic, is supposed to be a white guy.

Regarding the rest of the review, I did consider whether this falls under the heading of HNTWAN’s “I, Youngster” (using slang or references from one’s own youth to write a contemporary younger person), but I’d say no, because it’s supposed to sound ridiculous. Same with John’s movies; his taste is supposed to be bad, I don’t think Hussie actually thinks kids in 2009 still all liked bad movies from before they were born. That, and Hussie’s word choices are frankly like nothing I’ve ever seen anywhere else in any time period.

We shall move on, as so is the comic. Forty-seven pages into the comic, the main character finally leaves his bedroom. Wow. Things are happening at breakneck speed here.

TIER: Truly the pace strides forward like a Colossus through Lilliput.

GET ON WITH IT!: 2

CHEL: Though the silly Groucho Marx disguise he puts on is cute.

BRIGHT: Of course, since it would be interesting to see what’s in the mailbox (or at least would move the plot along a bit), John spends the next few pages examining his home.

I’m torn about this. On the one hand, it does a bit more fleshing out of John and his home life, which is more interesting than endless sylladex shenanigans, and the narration is entertaining. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure that on my first read through I clicked through all of it, trying to get to something happening. It holds up better on the re-read to me.

Well, something does happen, John knocks over the urn containing his grandmother’s ashes and opens a box from his father which holds a full-sized harlequin doll. Again, how much this appeals depends on what you think of ‘loveable dork’ characters fumbling around.

Then we return briefly to John’s bedroom, where we meet the third character of this webcomic, tentacleTherapist, or the alluded-to TT. The conversation isn’t very long, but it does give a good sense of what TT is like.

CHEL: Specifically, prone to sarcasm and sesquipedalian loquaciousness. Also to inappropriate jokes. An invocation of the hentai trope "tentacle rape" (read her handle quickly) is a fairly uncomfortable username for a child to have.

CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 2

Anyway, it seems she knows John very well - she’s able to guess he’s wearing “one of your disguises” with no clue in his messages, so evidently he does this a lot. She’s probably the smartest character introduced so far, and she and John seem to have a good relationship.

Now, again, this was originally a reader-driven forum game, but when it was collated into a webcomic, it might have been better to have the conversation with TT moved to before John left the room, so we’re not going back and forth unnecessarily. One journey through the house is enough, I’d say. Another GET ON WITH IT point, or does this come under the heading of the second point still? I’ll be nice and not count it, since he was going back to fetch an item and not just randomly wandering.

We definitely get more points from the text in Colonel Sassacre’s joke book:

And what of that tawny gent who puts his lackadaisical lean near the sarsaparilla font? You’ll have that listless octoroon find the spring in his step just yet! CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 3 WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 2

The point of these lines is that the text is outdated and racist, not that it should be emulated, but the “outdated” point was more than got across by the language used already. And it would seem fairly weird for a person who wasn’t white to read a line like that and not comment on it - okay, maybe John’s read it before and is used to it, but the narrator ought to point that out if it had ever bothered him.

FAILURE ARTIST: Colonel Sassacre is basically Mark Twain with a party hat photoshopped on to him. Mark Twain’s most famous work, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, has gotten into trouble in recent years because of the name of one of the characters: [N-word] Jim. The novel is progressive for its time but it hasn’t aged well. I’m guessing Colonel Sassacre’s unnecessary racism is a nod to that controversy.

CHEL: Get used to Photoshopped depictions of real people, too.

BRIGHT: John ventures out into the house again, ostensibly to retrieve the game but really to stick his fake arms to the harlequin doll and nose around his father’s study. Should the comment about the peanut allergy count towards ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY? In context with the can of peanuts I think there’s meant to be a joke here…

There is also a CAN OF PEANUTS on the desk. Ha ha, oh DAD. You won't be falling for THAT one again any time soon. A severe peanut allergy is a terrible affliction to cope with.

CHEL: That line? Yeah, it's a reference to the snake nut can prank item - have you seen those on cartoons, where someone offers canned snacks and a spring-loaded toy snake pops out? A dark joke, sure, but my sense of humour tends to run that way and I loled. CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS instead, possibly? I don’t know if people with life-threatening allergies would be offended by this - the joke isn’t that they’re weak or stupid or anything, the joke is the play on the reader’s expectations. I wouldn’t mind it if I had a peanut allergy, but as I said, my sense of humour is pretty dark.

FAILURE ARTIST: I feel like if a certain other parent we meet later did that people would take it as abusive.

CHEL: My assumption was that John’s dad didn’t actually mean to give him food that would kill him, that was just an unfortunate way of finding out he was allergic, but in this comic, who the fuck knows?... Come to think of it, maybe he did mean to. Peanut allergies run in families and it’s established much later on that one of the relatives involved (it gets complicated) also has a deadly peanut allergy, so it would seem logical that Dad would also have one and thus wouldn’t have them around to eat himself. Even if he did, that’s a bad move with an allergic person in the house. Maybe it is worth an ARE YOU TRYING point, then? Maybe this is just overanalysing, but then overanalysing is the whole point of this exercise, so there it goes!

ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 1

For clarification of the listed counts, this isn’t going under CALL CPA PLEASE because that one’s for when the kids do something disturbing themselves. We’ll show you what we mean when it comes up. We'll be nice and let Rose have an inappropriate username, that's not out of the ordinary for kids that age.

And speaking of said points, what about Dad giving John at least four birthday cakes? (He has two untouched ones in his room at the point he says he’s been eating cake all day, and Dad soon tries to give him yet another one.) That sounds cool from a thirteen-year-old’s point of view, but it kinda comes across as if Dad’s trying to feed him to death, and intentionally making kids horribly unhealthy can be a form of abuse. Or possibly to make up for something awful he knows about… Is the latter further evidence for the “guardians know about what’s coming” theory? Dad’s coddling John because he knows horrible things are going to happen? Hell, were the peanuts an attempted mercy kill, if we wanna get really tinfoil hat about it?

All that’s for later, though. Meantime, we get our first page with sound, as John plays “Showtime”, a nifty little piano tune.

"Homestuck // Showtime (Piano Refrain) // Piano" (Watch on YouTube)

The other kids get their own individual little musical parts too, later on, which merge to form one full piece.

FAILURE ARTIST: Music is a big draw in Homestuck. Not just these four main characters but pretty much every character has their own leitmotif.

[homespork-review]

Spork Introduction

CHEL: Hi! I go by Chel, they or she pronouns, and I’m the one spearheading this project. I still like at least a fair percentage of Homestuck, but after the ending disappointed me a great deal, I got bitter, and when Hussie pissed me off further by Godwinning himself, I decided to do something about it. I’m no longer angry about it, but I felt I’d benefit from picking out what I hate from what I love so I can focus on the latter without annoyance getting in the way, and also to benefit my own writing efforts.

BRIGHT: Howdy! I’m Bright, and I got into Homestuck fairly recently. After ploughing through the archive and digesting for a while, I realised that I was thoroughly annoyed by how something enjoyable had fallen apart so comprehensively. I am looking forward to the time-honoured practice of ripping the story apart to identify its weak points and shout at them.

FAILURE ARTIST: Hello, I’m Failure Artist (call me FA for short), she/her/herself pronouns, and I’m so old-school they burned the school down. I was introduced to Homestuck via Something Awful’s Webcomic thread. I checked the old mspadventures.com site and the latest update was [S] John: Bite Apple. After watching that bizarre piece of animation, I had to know what the hell happened before then. I found I enjoyed the wit of the comic though I didn’t really care much about the plot. It was only when Act 5 came around that I became a serious fan. I currently have 122 Homestuck works on Archive of Our Own. I have a lot of free time, you see. I am very disappointed in how Homestuck ended. Possibly there was no completely satisfactory way it could end but it still could have been better. I feel like Hussie was a juggler who threw a lot of balls into the air and ignored them as they fell to the ground and some fans think not catching them was a master move since you’d expect he’d try to catch at least one. Sadly, lots of the problems with the ending are embedded deep within the canon.

TIER: Hi hi. I am Tier, a very late newcomer to the wonderful world of Homestuck (2018 reader!) and average fan overall. I love this webcomic to bits, but the low points are deep and I enjoy seeking out what the heck went wrong. Not particularly analytical myself, hope that's cool!

CHEL: Cool by us! We’ve already done plenty of analysing before we started, as you may realise from my Tumblr’s “homestuck ending hate” tag (at @chelonianmobile).

FAILURE ARTIST: But let’s put that aside for a moment and talk about the good stuff. 

Homestuck is incredibly innovative. It is the first true webcomic. It’s not just a print comic posted online. It uses not just still images and words but also animation, music, and interactive games.

Homestuck is the latest adventure in the series MS Paint Adventures. MS Paint Adventures started as a forum adventure. In forum adventures, the OP acts as a sort of Dungeon Master and other forum members give them prompts. Andrew Hussie’s previous works under MS Paint Adventures were Jailbreak (which is little more than Hussie dicking with the prompters in scatological ways), Bard’s Quest (Choose-your-own-adventure), and the actually-completed Problem Sleuth. Problem Sleuth lacks the music and animation and despite the weird physics shenanigans is a simpler story than Homestuck. The characters aren’t even two dimensional.

Homestuck (and the previous MS Paint Adventures minus Bard’s Quest) are set up like adventure games. Adventure games are where the player is a protagonist in a story and are usually focused on puzzle-solving though sometimes there’s combat. In the beginning, these games were purely text. The player would type what they wanted to do and the game would spout back text describing it - assuming the computer parser understood you.

CHEL: Oh god, I HATED that. I wasn’t around for the heyday but I’ve played a couple and

Pale Luna

was barely an exaggeration (horror warning).

FAILURE ARTIST: As graphics improved, adventure games started using them, but the commands were still in text. Only later was the point-and-click interface created and players didn’t have to guess what exact sentence the computer wanted them to type. Homestuck and the other MS Paint Adventures play with that frustration while paying tribute to the genre. The game within the comic uses RPG elements but the comic itself is set up like those good ol’ adventure games. In the beginning, Homestuck was guided by commands from forum members. Even after he closed the suggestion box, he used memes and fanon created by readers.

CHEL: How good an idea this was varies, as we’ll be showing.

We probably don’t need to describe Homestuck much more. Everyone here who hasn’t read it will doubtless have heard of it. Almost everyone with a Tumblr will have seen fanart, almost anyone at a convention will have seen cosplay. Shoutouts have been made to it in professional works such as the cartoon Steven Universe, and the Avengers fandom latched onto “caw caw motherfuckers” as a catchphrase for Hawkeye to the point that it’s now often forgotten it didn’t originate from there.

FAILURE ARTIST: The Homestuck fandom term “sadstuck” for depressing stories/headcanons somehow leaked into other fandoms. Using second-person is actually cool now and not just for awkward reader fics. Astrology will never be the same again.

CHEL: Now, in the interests of fairness, we will say that when Homestuck is good, it’s amazing, and it’s good often. The characters at least start out appealing and are all immediately distinguishable; even with the typing quirks stripped, it’s easy to tell who said what. The magic system is one of the coolest I’ve ever seen, who doesn’t love classpecting themselves and their faves? Hussie also shows a lot of talent for the complex meta and time travel weirdness, and it is fascinating to watch a timeline thread unfurl. And whatever else one says, it’s a fascinating story that’s captivated millions. I think it is deserving of its title as a modern classic.

However, as the years have passed, we have ended up noticing problems, big and small, and they nagged at us until we decided it had to be dissected. Our intention here isn’t to tear apart something we loathe entirely. It’s to take a complex work and pick out what works from what doesn’t. As I said, when Homestuck is good, it’s very very good. But when it’s bad, we get problems of every scale from various offensive comments to dragging pace to characters ignoring problems and solutions right under their noses to an absolute collapse of every theme and statement the comic stood for before.

The comic is ludicrously long; eight thousand pages, or thereabouts, to be specific. Officially one of the longest works of fiction in the English language, in fact. Naturally, we can’t riff that word by word in any timeframe short of decades, and we can’t include every picture, even if that was permitted under copyright law. Instead, as comics have been done here before, we’ll recap most of the time, and include sections of dialogue and pictures when particularly relevant to a point.

Here are the counts we’ll be using, possibly to be added to later if we find we forgot anything. Most of these counts will only start to climb post-Act 5, but we’ll be keeping track of them from the beginning. Most of them could have been fixed with a decent editor, which is sadly a hazard of webcomics, but still frustrating to read.

TIER: Note: we started this endeavor months before the thought of a "technically not but still we'll count it" set of canon epilogues were a twinkle in the eyes of the fandom. That is, by the way, a whole 'nother can of worms that will be dealt with at a later date if that ever comes around. We're judging Homestuck the Webcomic as a whole, so no after the credits stuff is to be noted for whatever reason.

ALL THE LUCK - Vriska Serket constantly gets a pass or gets favored over every other character. This count is added to every time she pulls some shenanigans with which others wouldn’t get away. ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY? - Sometimes it’s not entirely clear whether a thing is supposed to be taken seriously or not. We don’t require hand-holding through every joke, but when, for example, we’re supposed to take one instance of violence seriously while a similar case is supposed to be funny, this count goes up. CALL CPA PLEASE - Instances of creepy sexual behaviour (and perhaps particularly gratuitous acts of violence) from the thirteen-year-old cast. Now, mileage may vary on this one. We won’t pretend that thirteen-year-olds are perfect pure angels, especially thirteen-year-olds growing up in what is openly supposed to be a nightmarish dystopia. However, when full pages focus on said behaviour, there comes a point of it being very uncomfortable to read. Clarification: does not refer to cases where the adults do something heinous, this is strictly when the kids do. CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS - When an offensive joke or comment is made, particularly when not justified by the personality of the character involved, or presented in the narration as being okay. GET ON WITH IT! - When the pace drags. ‘Nuff said. Hazard of the format, but it makes archive bingeing very annoying. GORE GALORE - For unnecessary and/or excessive torture porn which is treated less seriously because it features troll characters, and therefore less “realistic” blood colours. HOW NOT TO WRITE A WEBCOMIC - When the comic does something mentioned in How Not To Write A Novel, and it isn’t justified by the webcomic format. HURRY UP AND DO NOTHING - Characters repeatedly neglect to do something about or even react to terrible happenings, either because they don’t care even if they should or they forget they have the capacity. Not necessarily anything to do with their magical powers, either - characters ignore personal problems that are right under their noses, too. IN HATE WITH MY CREATION - For reasons that are unclear, Hussie chose to create characters he apparently hated writing, or at least ignored in favour of others. Every time he’s clearly disrespecting one of his own characters, this goes up, whether it’s by nerfing their powers or changing their personalities. RELATIONSHIP GOALS? - Romantic relationships in particular get fumbled quite often. Ship Teasing is used with skill, but that skill tends to be lost when the characters actually hook up. Fumbled friendships and family relations can also come under this heading. SEND THEM TO THE SLAMMER - When characters other than Vriska get away with something morally questionable. Covers everything from sexual harassment to not trying to save people from the apocalypse. SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS - Later on in Homestuck’s run, Hussie tried to make up for the offensive humour and casual -isms counted by Clockwork Problematykks above. How successful he was at this varied. This count goes up whenever an attempt at progressivism is waved in front of the reader but doesn’t stand up under scrutiny. WHAT IS HAPPENING?? - When the already confusing plot kicks it up a notch. Admittedly this is as much a selling point of the comic as it is an issue, but either way, we’re going to keep track. Points will be added to when it gets confusing, and taken away when a previous confusing thing is explained adequately. WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM - What is shown about Alternia repeatedly contradicts what we’re told about how different it is from Earth. For example, trolls still use heteronormative terms even after it’s established they reproduce bisexually, and the demonstration of the class structure doesn’t always add up. This count goes up every time that happens. It also goes up every time something happens which strongly implies Hussie was envisioning the human kids as white, despite his later claims that they were always supposed to be “aracial”, and every time their economic statuses don’t add up either.

[homespork-review]

Homespork Act 2: The Racism of the Conductor’s Baton (Part 3)

BRIGHT: Also, the prompts in John’s head are back and are making increasingly strident demands. Namely, they want John to follow Nannasprite to the cookies. John isn’t too keen on this idea. He’s so not-keen on it that he fails to notice Rose whacking him in the head with a box. Frustrated by his lack of compliance, the voice devolves into insults. I’m not sure why the Wayward Vagabond is so insistent on this? It’s not like he can eat the cookies.

On the whole this is a really good sequence, I think. It lays out some basic background information for the reader and John, and it’s paced pretty well.

Back in the future, an agitated slip of the finger causes a cupboard door to open in the Wayward Vagabond’s hideout. Out fall a few tins of food and a heavy tome of HUMAN ETIQUETTE.

Rose has updated her GameFAQs walkthrough with the new information from Nannasprite. We’re getting something of a motif here: Cut-aways to the Wayward Vagabond are followed by a walkthrough update. It’s a nice little pattern.

Rose also speculates on the prototyping process and on why the prototypings of other players worldwide have not affected John’s foes, and comes to the conclusion that each client/server pair -- or daisy chain -- spawns its own copy of the Incipisphere, or ‘session’. She’s also caught up in rewriting her work. Couldn’t the reader go somewhere else? Or somewhen else?

Why yes, the reader can. Namely the reader can jump back to Rose’s birthday, where she’s having a conversation with GG.

This conversation reinforces that there’s something funny about GG. She asks about John’s present the moment Rose opens it, and Rose isn’t surprised by this. GG also knows without being told that Rose’s dead pet is a male cat, and she’s been working on her birthday present for John for years.

Finally, she asks what Rose would say if GG told her she knew a game that could bring said cat back to life.

TT: If someone told me that, I would regard the remark with a great deal of skepticism. TT: If that someone was you, on the other hand, then I would have to ask preemptively: TT: Is that someone you? GG: yes that someone is me!!!!!!!! GG: i just thought you might find it interesting TT: So what is this game?

Whatever strange abilities GG has, Rose is familiar with her knowing things she shouldn’t, and trusts her even when she makes claims that sound impossible.

CHEL: Note, also, that here GG is the one who brings up the game, while in an early convo with John set chronologically after this one she asked “lol! whats sburb?” This is not an inconsistency. Again, it comes up later. We end up saying that a lot. Sorry.

BRIGHT: Also: Rose knows John well enough to guess that he was wearing a disguise when he talked to her earlier -- but still interprets his gift of knitting needles and yarn as a subtle jab at her habit of making analytical comments, much as her mother. GG points out that he probably didn’t mean it that way. Later, Rose says she’ll make him a gift with strong sentimental value as a dig at him, but admits she doesn’t really mean it that way when GG points it out. Then again, this takes place some months before the comic starts, and may show how Rose and John’s relationship has evolved.

Back in Dave’s home, the sun is beating down. Meteors pepper the city, and smoke is rising. Dave captchalogues his katana, and sets out in search of his brother’s copy of the game.

Dave elaborates a little on the concept of irony that he and his brother live by. His brother is awesome, apparently. Dave can only hope to one day reach those heights of irony.

The puppet theme from earlier continues, with puppets strewn around the living room where Bro lives and sleeps. Among them are a Mr. T puppet, which is wearing a leather thong and handcuffed to a pantsless Chuck Norris puppet. What makes it a little disturbing is that this is just lying out in the living room, which Dave presumably goes into all the time. Dave’s narration here sounds a lot like he’s trying to convince himself that these things are totally cool, no, really. He can’t see Lil Cal anywhere, though...

CHEL: Other puppets are the iconic Smuppets, possibly a portmanteau of “smutty puppets”, vaguely humanoid nude puppets with enormous behinds and phallic noses. There are implications that they are intended for non-PG purposes. Further implications are that the leaving of obscene material around the home has been going on for all of Dave’s life. For the record, intentionally showing pornography or sexual aids to children is classed as a form of sexual abuse. Casually leaving them lying around the house in front of kids long-term, well, the motive may not be malicious but I doubt a jury would care. It certainly counts as neglect. The popular fanfic Brainbent explored the damage this kind of thing could inflict on a kid in a realistic setting.

Also note, there is no hint of Dave having or ever having had parents, not even a photo in the background or something. The immediate assumption would most likely be that they’re dead, but Bro’s strangeness might also suggest estrangement - behaviour like that would probably result in one’s parents not talking to one anymore, though they most likely wouldn’t leave a child in a place like that if they were around. We find out the truth later, and it’s even weirder.

BRIGHT: Between one panel and the next, Lil Cal appears atop a speaker box. Dave is fine with this. Totally fine.

CHEL: For the record, this is Lil Cal:

Not something one would be very happy about finding behind one, is he?

BRIGHT: He plays a bit on the Xbox, gives Cal a fistbump, and then checks out his brother’s computer. It’s password-protected, but Dave knows the password, and Bro knows he knows it, and Dave knows this, and it’s all totally cool.

One of Bro’s websites is a puppet pornography website. Apparently this is popular enough to bring in thousands of dollars a month, and Smuppets are a multi-billion-dollar-per-year enterprise. Time for our next point:

Magic-onomics - wherein characters’ funds issue from nowhere Half-baked attempts to justify a protagonist’s mystery money can also backfire. Explanations should amount to more than “Somehow Rain had lots of money.” Giving Rain an inheritance, or explaining that she recently gave up her job at a top law firm to pursue her art, will work only where these things feel like part of the world of the novel.

Bro and Dave live in a crappy apartment in which Bro doesn’t even have his own bedroom, instead sleeping on the futon in the living room where he works. Yet they have the funds to spend on swords (not cheap) and expensive turntables. The Con Air bunny prop Dave bought for John sold in real life for almost $1,300.

And how the heck do smuppets bring in multiple billions of dollars a year? That’s a niche market, even if Bro is the only supplier. (Which he wouldn’t be — if it’s worth that much, someone else would want in on the market.)

CHEL: Even if said market is fairly disturbing. If there’s enough people who like it enough to buy it, there’ll be people comfortable with supplying it.

BRIGHT: Their income shouldn’t be anywhere near that high, even with puppet pornography adding to the revenue stream. If we grant that in this universe it is that high, then they should be living somewhere more comfortable.

HOW NOT TO WRITE A WEBCOMIC: 13

CHEL: In order for this to actually work as stated, not only would the puppets have to appeal to everyone on the planet, but there would probably have to be a lot more people on the planet than there actually are. I’m pretty sure it’s an exaggeration for humour, but considering the inconsistencies with their income status as presented, it’s still a bit shaky.

It’s also worth another count, because this is basically a handwave to mean the characters presented aesthetically as poor are still as financially secure as is necessary for writing the scenes Hussie wants to:

WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 6

If the comic was presented as a non-serious cartoon for the whole story, this would pass without comment, but when one’s trying to be dramatic and include real stakes, I think one needs to apply real stakes to everyday things too.

BRIGHT: Then again, it’s possible that their financial status is higher than the apartment would suggest, and Bro just chooses to spend his money on katanas and expensive equipment rather than upgrading. (And/or is lying to Dave about their income.) That might not be out of character given what we see of him later. But overall, this is a mess.

FAILURE ARTIST: Maybe the Smuppets is a money laundering business.

CHEL: A lot of people would read that fanfic.

The theory that the guardians knew the game was coming might explain why he chose to spend so much on swords, at least. He’d know Dave would need them. Not so much of an explanation for everything else though. Considering the weirdness that’s going on, I could imagine Bro not wanting attention drawn to it, but wouldn’t hiding weirdness be much harder in a flat than in a house set off some distance from neighbours?

For that matter, where’s John getting the money for movie memorabilia? Later reveals show the Egbert family originally came from money but they don’t seem to have that much to throw around now.

BRIGHT: Remember how Rose said earlier that she quite enjoyed Bro’s websites? I think that counts as a point for CALL CPA PLEASE…

FAILURE ARTIST: I question how pornographic the site really is. It might just literally be puppets being mashed together with no human body parts. A thirteen year old can surely see that.

BRIGHT: Fair point -- the page we see is teen-safe, at any rate.

CHEL: If it isn’t actually sexual, that possibly makes the supposed popularity level even sillier. Fetishists need constant fresh material and there are probably people who don’t have a specific puppet fetish who would ignore the puppets to look at the guy, but to keep up that level of popularity the viewers who don’t have a puppet fetish would have to keep finding it funny long after most people would think the joke had worn off. Both options say disturbing things about the world this comic is set in and their tastes in either pornography or humour. At least Veronica Chaos appears onscreen with her puppet… (Link contains no porn but you probably don’t want it on a work computer.)

For the record, I think Smuppets would actually make pretty bad sex toys. Plush is a porous material, so it would be hard to clean sticky substances out of it properly, and the phallic noses seem to be too floppy to use for penetration of a human orifice. Maybe that first point is why he brings in so much cash - the smuppets are single-use? People do use plush toys for masturbatory purposes, but usually when they can’t find anything else to use, specific fetishes for them being rare, and generally don’t use the soft parts as penetration toys.

Personally, I quite like the theory the kinkmeme brought up years ago; PlushRumps is actually an elaborate multimedia webcomic a la Homestuck itself. Now that I can see bringing in that much cash. Or possibly it just looks like this, which was made by the guy who wrote Thirty Hs (warning for eye injury and surreality): "Jumping!" (Watch on YouTube)

I could see Bro being that dude.

BRIGHT: And Dave admits, again, that he finds the puppet thing unsettling.

This is a pretty good depiction of someone trying to convince himself to be okay with something that freaks him out. He pesters John to distract himself from the puppets everywhere, and when he doesn’t get a response, he pesters Rose. And Hussie once again repeats the entire blinking pesterlog we read fifty pages ago instead of just linking back to it.

GET ON WITH IT!: 6

CHEL: Just occurred to me; why is Dave so bothered by the puppets? I can’t imagine that Bro suddenly started leaving them around when he hadn’t before - in fact, I believe a later flashback shows infant Dave using a Smuppet’s nose as a pacifier (eww, god I hope it was a freshly-made unused one). Dave really ought to be used to the things by now. Then again, now he’s reaching his teens, he’s probably old enough to start realising this is weird and creepy on a deeper level. But then that brings up the same problem we had with John; doesn’t he have any local friends he could have learned this from sooner? Though I could picture Bro not bothering to send him to school, and we do later learn there is quite possibly magic afoot in hiding the oddness of the Strider household. That’s a complicated theory and requires much more setup than we have here, though, so pin in that for later.

Also, the puppets thing counts for a point of ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?, and Dave is in fact the reason we created that count. A kid in Dave’s situation in real life would be messed up, but so would a kid in the situations of the others (or at least the girls), and Dave’s situation seems to be taken more seriously than theirs, at least later on.

ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 5

BRIGHT: Back to Rose, who’s beating John over the head with a box in a futile effort to get his attention. She eventually gives up and deploys another piece of equipment called a Punch Designix, using the Shale John collected. Since she doesn’t know what it does, she pesters John and asks him to experiment.

Unfortunately John has bigger problems to deal with: His garden is by this point overrun with imps, who are climbing on his tire swing and wearing his disguises. This is enough to snap him out of his Wayward Vagabond-induced state and get him to respond to Rose. They need to get those monsters off his pogo ride!

Fortunately, Rose is able to help by picking up the piano and dropping it on the imp. Less fortunately, the piano does not survive the experience. Neither does the imp.

The pogo ride seems fine, though.

John is reluctant to risk Nanna’s ghost cookies to go retrieve the grist, so Rose uses the pogo ride to transport it up to his room. Then she tells him to go find out what the Punch Designix does, while she works on building the house up to the gate. Apparently stairs cost a lot of grist to build. John makes a SBaHJ reference while Rose recoups the grist she used to build the catwalk earlier, sending an imp tumbling into the depths.

In the kitchen, Nannasprite has produced a lot of cookies. An imp tries to sneak one, and is blasted into grist by Nanna as a result.

John sets out on a hunt for imps and useful items, grabbing some shaving cream and his pogo ride, and launching his telescope out of the window. Amazingly, this proves relevant only a few pages later.

CHEL: Dad apparently keeps an entire cabinet filled with nothing but shaving cream. Rule of Funny, I know, but how fast does this guy’s beard grow?

BRIGHT: His living room is full of imps, who have taken a shine to the Cruxtruder and left cruxite dowels lying everywhere. Armed with hammer and shaving cream, John mounts his trusty steed and pogos his way to victory, which works amazingly well (read: works at all), until he slips on a cruxite dowel and lands flat on his back.

This is incredibly dangerous!

Acting on a polite prompt, John absconds into his Dad’s study, and Rose covers his retreat with the refrigerator, which levels up to FIVESTAR GENERAL ELECTRIC and earns 285 Boondollars.

Further extremely polite prompts ask John for a can opener. Despite the presence of two imps in the study with him, John stops to consider where to find one, while Rose takes out the imps with Dad’s safe. I don’t think that counts as HURRY UP AND DO NOTHING, though, since it’s clearly supposed to be the joke.

Back in the future, the Wayward Vagabond munches on a few pages from the etiquette book. Rose updates her GameFAQs walkthrough with a series of images of John’s house in the Medium. She does refer to Colonel Sassacre’s as racist in one of these, but it’s not really much of a rebuttal.

CHEL: She experiments with building a bit more on John’s house; ladders prove cheaper to build than stairs, albeit harder to use safely. John eventually stops contemplating can openers to examine the Punch Designix, while Rose answers Dave’s angry rant about being buried in Smuppets. I think this may be another point for ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY, because in the context of a kid ranting about his brother’s annoying hobby and his friend snarking back it’s hilarious, and it seems at this point to be presented as funny, but as discussed above the nature of Smuppets makes this rather creepy.

ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 6 TG: i am enrobed in chafing, wriggling god fucking damned puppet pelvis TG: an obscenely long, coarse kermit cock is being dragged across my anguished face TT: Let's put this into perspective. You put up with the puppet prostate because you love it.

Okay, this I think could be a point for CALL CPA PLEASE. A child probably would make fun of another child’s discomfort with non-consensually being surrounded by sex toys on the grounds of not knowing better, but it’s unsettling to read.

CALL CPA PLEASE: 2

John discovers there are codes on the backs of his captchalogue cards, which can be entered into the Punch Designix to make punch cards. Punching the captchalogue card itself renders the item irremovable from it, but the punch card can, he guesses, be used to recreate the item via the Totem Lathe and Alchemiter. Before he can test this, Rose hurls a bathtub through the wall to kill some nearby imps; to be fair, when he checks his PDA, he sees he missed a message from her warning him about it. He messages her back and she says the precarious staircase up to the gate is ready. John is nervous and asks why she didn’t build straight up through the hole in his dad’s bedroom ceiling.

EB: oh come on. what's the big deal, i'll just climb up and go right through! TT: Will you? EB: yeah, why not? TT: Are you saying you've never wondered what's in there? Or why it's been kept a secret from you? EB: well, i mean yeah... TT: Then trust me. You won't be going "right on through." EB: wait, are you saying there's something, like... EB: troubling in there? TT: I don't know. EB: what do you mean? what do you see in there? TT: I can't see in there. EB: oh. TT: But I don't have a very good feeling about it. EB: pfff... EB: whatever! EB: i think i can handle a few more stupid clown paintings.

Well, that’s ominous.

Examining the destroyed safe, John finds a book about shaving, several old newspaper clippings about meteor strikes, and a much older copy of Colonel Sassacre’s book, possibly the one involved in the mysterious accident which caused Nanna’s death. Behind where the safe was, he finds an empty captchalogue card and a proud fatherly note from Dad, praising him for now being strong enough to lift the safe; presumably intended for several years in the future at least, since the safe is big enough to fit John inside it. The note further explains that John is now entitled to the contents of the safe, and provides the now-useless combination for the lock. Further sylladex shenanigans launch Sassacre’s book, killing an imp, and John heads up the stairs, but slips. As he precariously clings on, the hands and jester’s motley of something much, much bigger than the imps start to emerge from the chasm...

Cut back to Dave, still searching for the beta and/or his brother, finding only that one of Bro’s swords is missing. A brief shadowy flash takes the second sword from the wall too.

You know this drill all too well. Trouble's a brewin'.

Dave heads for the door, finding one of Bro’s “ironic” comics pinned to it. The comic in question:

Erm.

TIER: Now that is, as the folks would say, unsettling.

FAILURE ARTIST: This is another work that Hussie created pre-Homestuck and decided to add. It was part of this drawing battle on a forum.

CHEL: It took me an embarrassingly long time to realise that was supposed to be Kermit. I was seeing it as a teddy bear, with the spiral cheeks as eyes and the eyes as ears.

TIER: . . . I was “literally just now” years old when I realized that was supposed to be Kermit.

BRIGHT: Ditto!

CHEL: Me too, actually, it was after I saw it while posting it here. Before I thought it was Fozzie, drawn even worse than the rest of the comic.

Dave is fairly mellow about the comic as compared to his reaction to the puppets, but thinks that he “[doesn’t] need to see this shit right now”. It looks like something a kid his age would either draw themselves or like (I know I would have loved it), but having things like this pasted randomly about your house would definitely be unsettling even so. He understands it as further irony, and thinks Bro is trying to annoy him with it as “some weird gauntlet he's throwing down to see if you will "GET IT"”.

Worse than the comics, however, is what’s in the kitchen. Weapons are piled up on every counter and the sink is full of fireworks. Dave considers this “awesome”, the implication again being that this has been normal for his whole life. He’s really lucky he’s a cartoon character, there’s no way a real kid would still be alive here. When he turns on the blender, a green puppet in it is shredded to pieces, releasing fake blood; inside the eye socket of a Jigsaw puppet on top of the microwave is a webcam, broadcasting the incident. Okay, again, we need to consider how “pornographic” PlushRumps actually is to determine whether this is a problem. Videos of a kid shredding a puppet are harmless in and of themselves. If it’s actually being marketed as fetish material… ew. Dave appears just as unsettled by this as I am, enough so to behead the cam-puppet, so the implications aren’t good.

More Smuppets spill out of the microwave, and then we go back into fucking sylladex shenanigans as Dave tries to collect every dangerous object in the room

GET ON WITH IT!: 7

Distracted by same, Dave fails to notice a silhouetted figure which is presumably his brother appearing briefly behind him, dropping Cal on the stovetop, and disappearing. Dave’s expression doesn’t change on seeing it but he literally leaps a foot in the air. Poor kid, that is freaky. We also discover why Dave had juice in his closet way back; Bro uses the fridge as storage space for swords instead of comestibles, and cherry bombs in the icemaker.

… Okay, where does Bro keep his own food? Both humorously and actually abusive/neglectful guardians still require energy intake, you know. There are later hints that Bro himself is someone’s puppet, but only in the figurative sense.

TIER: Dude probably has spots around the apartment to stash stuff, like how Dave has apple juice hidden away in his closet.

Figuring out how seriously we're supposed to be taking things can get tricky, especially with the Big Thing way later on in the comic putting earlier events in a new light upon rereading (well, mostly just stuff related to Dave).

CHEL: And if we are supposed to take it seriously, how the fuck is Dave alive? A real kid in this situation wouldn’t have lived long enough to be traumatised.

[homespork-review]

Homespork Act 2: The Racism of the Conductor’s Baton (Part 2)

FAILURE ARTIST: We don’t get much time to mourn with Dave because the comic flashes to a weird wizard statue. This statue is ZAZZERPAN THE LEARNED. Wizards are another recurring theme in Homestuck. Andrew Hussie once artfully defaced this cheesy book called Wizardology (warning: lots of really offensive humor). Anyway, Rose hates the giant statue and the other wizard paraphernalia her mother collects and believes her mother does this only to spite her. On a platform is a bronzed vacuum (with a place to put alcoholic beverages) that Rose gave her as an ironic present. On the couch there’s a life-sized princess doll that Rose has attached a Cthulhu-type head to. All these things set up Rose’s troubled relationship with her mother. Rose believes her mother is taunting her and Rose taunts her back.

BRIGHT: This scene also establishes that some things (the Cthulhu doll for one) are too big to be captchalogued.

CHEL: Actually, that was noted with the harlequin doll earlier but we forgot to mention that.

FAILURE ARTIST: Rose goes to the kitchen. On the fridge is a crude picture of her late cat Jaspers, who turns out to be more than a family pet. There’s more signs of this cold war between mother and daughter on the fridge.

CHEL: Also, numerous liquor bottles in the kitchen and comically exaggerated displays of wealth, such as a fifteen-thousand-dollar picture frame.

FAILURE ARTIST: After fussing with the fridge, Rose tries to leave the kitchen only to run into her mother. She tries escaping but lands comically in some wizard statuettes.

CHEL: Mom Lalonde is mopping the floor, with no water in the bucket, holding a martini in her other hand. The woman clearly has a problem. Again, this is an issue with the portrayal of the parents; this is pretty funny, but were a real mother behaving this way, it would seriously mess up the kid, and whether we’re supposed to take it as Rule of Funny or not later becomes inconsistent.

BRIGHT: I think a lot of the humour here is supposed to come from the implication that Mom Lalonde actually is a loving if clueless (and drunk) parent, and Rose is reading her badly. On the other hand, something is clearly very wrong, and while Mom Lalonde may indeed be loving the situation is definitely having an impact on Rose.

TIER: Say whatever you want, but when putting on the late game Cerebus Retcon goggles there are probably non-humorous questions to be asked about how screwy Mom Lalonde is as a parental unit if her daughter has ended up interpreting most of her actions as mocking or backhanded towards herself. Like, kids don't just decide that.

ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 3

CHEL: Back to Dave, he’s chatting with GG and they’re being adorable. GG comments about her birthday present to John, the green box we saw in the car earlier, and…

GG: no!!!!!!! GG: he will not open it GG: he will lose it!!! TG: oh TG: uh TG: wow sorry to hear that i guess? GG: no its good actually! GG: because he will find it again later when he really needs it GG: which of course is why i sent it in the first place! TG: see like TG: i never get how you know these things GG: i dont know GG: i just know that i know!

I think here is when we start to get inklings of the kids’ unusual abilities - I mean, unusual in the context of the weird world they live in. A bit more is established about GG’s home life and Dave’s attitudes, too:

GG: i have to feed bec which is always a bit of an undertaking TG: man TG: if i were you i would just take that fucking devilbeast out behind the woodshed and blow its head off GG: heheheh! GG: i dont think i could if i tried!!! TG: yeah TG: say hi to your grand dad for me too ok GG: ._. GG: yes i guess an encounter with him is almost certain GG: it is usually........ GG: intense!!! TG: well yeah isnt it always with family TG: but he sounds like a total badass

“Intense” in a world where attacking your father with a hammer isn’t worthy of comment sounds worrying. We’ll see how that goes.

FAILURE ARTIST: Dave has the tiniest of smiles here and in Hussie’s annotation he says that one pixel created Dave/GG. Whether or not their connection is romantic, Dave obviously feels great affection for her.

CHEL: Interactions between all four of the kids are really sweet, honestly. Dialogue and character interactions are one of the strongest points of the comic overall. Personally I have a soft spot for the OT4.

TIER: In my unprofessional opinion, the beta humans are by far the most functioning and tight knit group of the various groups within the comic, for what that's worth considering the overall dysfunction junction. They're sweet to one another is what I'm saying.

CHEL: Dave talks to John, who mentions the creepy trails around his house and how he thinks he’s seen monsters, which we the audience have definitely seen; creepy little black imps with fangs and, oddly, jester outfits. They bear a striking resemblance to the Wayward Vagabond, in fact. Dave makes fun, but at least pretends not to disbelieve him, and urges him to keep his hammer at the ready. Dave can’t find his Bro, but can find “Lil Cal”, implying Bro is nearby.

TG: lil cal is the shit EB: that's fine, you are entitled to your opinion, i am just saying that being a white guy who is a rapper with a ventriloquist doll is not cool by any stretch of the imagination or by any definition of word cool, ironic or otherwise. that's all i'm saying. WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 5

Would a non-white rapping ventriloquist be any cooler? I’m struggling to see how. Ventriloquism, by definition, sucks the cool out of any other aspect of the thing. And now I’m picturing Carlton from Fresh Prince trying to rap with a ventriloquist’s doll.

BRIGHT: Back at the Lalonde residence, Rose attempts to ‘Youth Roll’ out of the front door, but her escape route is blocked by her mother, who appears with martini glass in hand. Time for our second Strife of the comic! (And can I say that I really like the music for this one?)

As with John’s strife with his dad, this strife tells us a lot about Rose’s relationship with her mother. John had the AGGRIEVE and ABJURE options; Rose also gets AGGRESS (PASSIVE) and ABSTAIN. It’s pretty telling that one of these options is an EMPTY SUICIDE THREAT, and ‘Abstain’ has Rose fending off her mother’s insistent offer of the martini glass.

FAILURE ARTIST: I liked the EMPTY SUICIDE THREAT at the time but now I think it deserves an ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?

BRIGHT: Mom Lalonde may be intended as loving-but-clueless, but she’s offering her thirteen year old daughter alcohol, over Rose’s protests, and something is clearly very wrong if suicide threats are a normal part of life. (Something similar will come up in the future, but in that context it isn’t played for laughs.)

ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 4

On a lighter note, ‘Abjure’ has her mother offering her A BEAUTIFUL PONY. Rose reacts in the moment like this is terrible, but does later pat the pony’s nose.

At any rate, the strife ends when Mom Lalonde apparently gets bored and decides to do some dusting. This takes all the fun out of using the front door, so Rose goes around the back to make her break for the generator.

Meanwhile, John is trying to read up on weaponizing sylladexes (sylladices?), but is being nagged by a voice to turn around — which he finally does, just in time for a monster to ram into him so hard it turns the panel pixelated. Strife time!

John’s bout with the Shale Imp kicks off with the monster threatening the Con Air bunny. John’s efforts to defend it are intercut with Rose’s progress out of the house and through the rain to the mausoleum. I think this interplay works quite nicely — it keeps both things moving without letting the reader get impatient -- but your mileage may vary.

The imp aggravates John by punching the bunny in the belly and waving it at him. John attacks the imp and breaks his hammer, then attacks it with the handle and gets knocked flat. Finally he weaponises his sylladex and chucks his inventory at it until it explodes into a shower of grist.

PUT THE BUNNY BACK IN THE BOX!!!!!! Now why couldn’t he put the bunny back in the box?

Because he’d set it as his strifekind, it turns out.

In true video game style, defeating the imp causes John to level up! In Homestuck, this is done by ascending one’s echeladder, a series of player levels with whimsical, old-fashioned names. John climbs two rungs, from Greentike to Plucky Tot, and earns 125 Boondollars.

Note how efficient this is: In one panel we can see that the echeladder is a levelling system, that Boondollars are in-Game currency, and that levelling up has increased John’s amount of grist and how much of it he can carry. He’s also got a new kind of grist called ‘Shale’. Hussie does take an extra panel to clarify the grist capacity expansion, but that makes sense as it’s a small part of the original panel. Compare this to the dozens of panels we’ve had laying out how sylladexes work. These panels are much more information-dense, and the comic flows better for it.

CHEL: Exactly what “grist” is and what it does beyond allowing changes to the house, why those changes are needed, and what “boondollars” are for hasn’t been explained yet, but will be soon, and it’s clear they’re something to do with the game so it’s not outright confusing.

BRIGHT: John spends the next few panels sorting his strife specibus out, and stashes the bunny in there for safekeeping. There’s something amiss, but he can’t quite put his finger on it...

Meanwhile, Rose has reached the mausoleum and prepares to activate the generator. The taxidermied corpse of her beloved pet lies in state, dressed in a tiny suit. A sad fate for an animal who should have peacefully decomposed in a flowerbed. Rose kicks it off the pedestal to make room for the laptop.

John discovers what’s wrong when a bucket of water perched atop his door lands on his head. The culprit behind this sudden dousing?

"[S] WHAT THIS IS SO OUTRAGEOUS (HD)" (Watch on YouTube)

Apparently the sprite has a sense of humour.

Next up is a pesterlog between Rose and Dave. There are hints that all is not well in the Strider residence.

TG: hey TG: dont tell john this but i think he might have been right about the puppets TG: theyre sort of starting to freak me out a little TT: You're referring to your brother's collection? TG: i mean dont get me wrong i think its cool and all TG: the semi-ironic puppet thing or whatever TG: or semi-semi ironic TG: man i dont even know TG: im just starting to think some of this shit is going a little far and its kind of fucked up TT: I've seen his websites. TT: I like them. TG: haha yeah well YOU WOULD TG: oh man i wish lil cal wouldnt look at me like that TG: with those dead eyes jesus TG: sometimes i dream that hes real and hes talking to me and i wake up in a cold sweat and basically flip the fuck out

Well, not so much hints as flashing neon signs. Dave’s gone very quickly from insisting that everything his brother does is cool and Lil Cal is awesome, to admitting that he has nightmares about Lil Cal and is freaked out by his brother’s ‘semi-ironic puppet thing’. We don’t know much about Bro’s websites yet, but we do know that Rose has a morbid streak, and Dave is clearly disturbed by the content.

Dave leaves to find his brother’s copy of the game, and we return to John, who, to quote Rose, has ‘just had a bucket of water dumped on his head by the ghost of his dead grandmother, who also happens to be dressed like a clown.’

And yes, that is indeed John’s dead Nanna, returned to help him on his journey through The Medium and beyond -- or at least, she claims she is. John has to take her word for it, as he doesn’t remember her at all. According to his Dad, John was pretty young when she died. Speaking of his Dad, he’s been kidnapped by the forces invading John’s home.

Nannasprite gives John the background of the game and what’s going on. His house is now in the Medium. This place was created by the game software, but is physically independent of it -- and no, he’s not inside a computer. The Medium floats in the Incipisphere, a place outside the normal flow of time in the kids’ universe. Above the Medium is the realm of Skaia.

According to Nannasprite:

Legend holds that Skaia exists as a dormant crucible of unlimited creative potential. What does this mean, you ask? I'm afraid my lips are sealed about that, dear! Hoo hoo!

Nannasprite is somewhat like a tutorial assistant for the game -- she helps guide John and provides information, although she’s somewhat cryptic.

We are getting a lot of new words here, but Hussie is defining them pretty well as we go, so I don’t think it merits a point.

At any rate, Skaia is defended by the forces of light, while forces of darkness plot its destruction. These two forces exist in an endless stalemate on a stage at the centre of Skaia until a player with a prototyped Kernelsprite enters the Medium. Then the prototyped Kernelsprite splits, with one Kernel carrying the prototyping information up to a kingdom basked in light, and another Kernel carrying it down to the kingdom of darkness. Each kingdom has four Spires, and when the Kernel reaches one, it propagates the prototyping information to the kingdom’s forces.

This is why the imps were dressed as jesters: John prototyped his Kernel with the harlequin doll, and whatever the other players prototype with will influence what forms the soldiers take. When the first Kernels reach the spires, the battlefield gets bigger and the war begins for real.

Oh, right -- and the forces of light are always destined to lose.

So what’s the point? Apparently, that’s for John to find out. For now, though, he needs to head towards Skaia, going through the first of seven Gates. The first Gate is situated directly above John’s house, but the others are going to be harder to reach. We now find out what all that Build Grist is for: To get to the Gate, they need to build the house higher to reach it. And then they can rescue John’s Dad, solve the ultimate riddle, and save the Earth from destruction!

...or not.

Nope, according to Nannasprite, Earth is doomed. Done for. Kaput. There is nothing they can do to save it.

John is pretty bummed about this. He isn’t cheered by Nanna’s assurance that he has a much more important purpose than saving the planet, although she fails to elaborate on that point and instead floats off to make cookies.

CHEL: I think here we earn another couple of points.

HURRY UP AND DO NOTHING: 2 HOW NOT TO WRITE A WEBCOMIC: 11 Failing the Turing Test - wherein the character has no reactions whatsoever While the emotional lives of characters should not be described in their every tiny wrinkle, characters must have emotional lives. When someone boos them off a stage, they should experience chagrin. When they fall from a tenth-storey window, they should feel alarm. The writer should not count on dialogue like “Yikes!” to get the point across.

Brief confusion and feeling “bummed out” by the news that one’s entire planet is doomed does not count as an adequate reaction. I’d expect more fear, more concern. As pointed out before, doesn’t John have any friends other than Dave, Rose, and GG? His Dad has friends, wouldn’t he be concerned for them on Dad’s behalf? If nothing else, more curiosity about this “more important” business?

BRIGHT: Now, I could actually buy this in some circumstances — John is a teenager, doesn’t seem to have close connections outside those we see on screen, and he’s been having one hell of a weird day. I wouldn’t be surprised if grasping the scope of destruction was simply beyond him at this point. It’s a lot to take in, and it’s only been a few hours since life went to hell in a handbasket — not to mention, he’s in an active combat zone. There’s a lot going on, and if he was to shove it out of his mind while he dealt with the immediate crisis, I could see that as pretty realistic.

Of course, that would depend on him actually reacting at some later point, when he had a chance to slow down and it could sink in. As it stands...well, if that does happen, we never see it.

CHEL: Does this also count as “Oh, Don’t Mind Him” for the How Not To score?

BRIGHT: I think so, yes.

CHEL: Then here it goes!

HOW NOT TO WRITE A WEBCOMIC: 12 Oh, Don’t Mind Him - where a character’s problems remain unexplored In real life, people are riddled with chronic problems that are not addressed for long periods of time, if ever. But in fiction, all problems are just the opening chords of a song. If there is a brother who has a problem with alcohol, a child who has lost her dog, or even someone whose car has simply broken down, the reader will worry about those people and expect the author to do something about it.

Technically, this could count for seven billion or so points, minus any people who successfully entered their own game sessions, but we don’t want to get out of hand here and it really only counts as one big problem.

However! I am very fond of this idea in theory. The obvious option would be that the purpose of the game is to save the player’s homeworld. We’ve all seen the “save the homeworld” idea in scifi and fantasy before. Here, the homeworld is beyond saving, but there is another option, and exploring that is the storyline. The forces of light cannot have a traditional victory; the protagonists must find a victory on the terms they have. It’s not a theme one sees often, and I like it.

FAILURE ARTIST: John and the other Beta Kids’ lack of angst of the destruction of their planet doesn’t stick out as much here as it will later when almost everything else is milked for angst.

CHEL: I’m not really sure the planet being destroyed is a great basis for a Rule-of-Funny-based story if that was what he was going for, to be honest. “Billions died, lol!”