#I'd kill for someone to read it and liveblog the experience to me

[drysauce]

mutuals this is your timely reminder to read omniscient reader's viewpoint because it's so so soooo cool

[hongluboobs]

book reader i have a copy of dream of the red chamber (volume 1) that ive been trying to get through for over a year how do i motivate myself to finish it

I'm recently coming out of a half a year ish period of not reading very much so trust me when I say the lack of motivation comes for us all. I think I have some tips for how to motivate reading in general+ some for DOTRC specifically :)

(Real quick, I assume because you mentioned a volume 1 you're talking about the Hawkes-David translation published by Penguin in five volumes under the name 'The Story of The Stone'. This is the translation I read through, and it's the one I see recommended most to english speakers looking for an enjoyable reading experience, so to any other prospective readers of this novel I HIGHLY recommend reading this translation as opposed to any other ones. I don't know if I need to say this or if it's well-known to seek out that version, but because Hong Lu's canto is coming up I want to make sure anyone interested in reading through the source material can have the best experience possible with it👍)

It's important to remember that reading is a hobby, and the best way to keep going with it is to make it a habit. Unfortunately, this means forcing yourself to read sometimes, but it comes easier the more you do it. The trick is: it doesn't have to be a lot of reading.

The hard part for me is really just picking up the book and starting to read. Normally with books I like to set a goal of a chapter or so per day, but because this book has longer chapters that wasn't always feasible for me, especially if I had stuff to do. But once I had the book in my hands and started reading I would usually go above my goal I had set :)

Last year a lot of my DOTRC reading was done while I was waiting in line for things, getting/eating food, waiting on the bus, or killing time between classes/during boring lectures (I don't know if I'd advise that last one). This is moreso once you get in the rhythm of things, though.

Another tip is sometimes the format is the thing to stop me. I don't know if you're reading from a physical book or an ipad/kindle/etc or a computer or what, but sometimes I read better on my laptop than other things because it's Always Around. Sometimes I don't feel like grabbing a book or I don't have it with me, but my laptop's already open and I'm bored so maybe I'll do a little bit of reading instead of scrolling social medias. Lately, i've been jumping between my laptop and kindle for reading (laptop for convenience, kindle for portability and reading before bed at night) but I've gone between physical books and digital devices before. (If you want the epub versions of dotrc, I'd be willing to share them as well. The only difficulty is page numbers change between reading formats so I can only really switch at the start of chapters or if I skim to where I last was.

Something that saved me while reading DOTRC specifically (as well as other sinner books) was having a place I could discuss/"liveblog" the book. These books can get LONG and the reading experience varies from "really interesting and compelling" to "oh my godddd I do not need 20 pages of Outdated Whale Facts right now". (no offense to Moby Dick. I'm only slandering that one because I read the whole thing and in spite of enjoying it I understand why there are SO many abridged versions around.) It's kind of just the classic lit experience to deal with these types of things, but it's a lot more tolerable to me if you can talk to other people about it.

When I read DOTRC I didn't have anyone else reading with me, but just having a place to tell people about all the things that happen in this book helped me to keep track of events and characters. It also motivated me to keep reading so I could tell The People what happened next. Having someone else read with me would probably have helped as well, but it's hard to sell people on reading a 5-volume behemoth of a novel with so much stuff in it it has it's own field of study dedicated to it.

You can really yap anywhere. I have a channel in my Limbus Discord dedicated to the books so I don't drive everyone insane with my rambling and it seems to have helped some of my friends get through some of the other books as well so I think this method is a pretty solid success? You could also pretty easily do it just in someone's DMs if they're already familiar with the book (this has the bonus of them potentially being able to clarify things for you and help you get a deeper understanding of the book) or even yapping on a tumblr sideblog or empty notes doc or something.

So TL;DR:

Picking up the book is the hardest part. Reading a little is better than not reading at all.

Subjecting your friends to this book will make it easier to keep going :)

Also: for Dream of the Red Chamber specifically: the book starts slow. I don't know how far in you are, but so many people drop it early. I started reading it during a 12-ish hour car ride and that might've been the play because i can see people getting bored during the first few chapters. It definitely picks up though, so trust me when I say it gets a lot easier to read as you keep going. Chapter 5 is an incredibly interesting chapter, and from there I find things pick up and start going faster. (It helps that chapter 5 is pretty relevant for the direction I think Limbus is going to take canto 8 in!) The later volumes were able to go by a lot faster for me than the earlier ones as well.

This is a long ass book, but it's gonna be a while before Hong Lu's canto drops and we get to Witness that Surrender. Or Surrender that Witness. I'm not actually sure. But regardless, you've got plenty of time to get through it, even if you're a slower reader or don't have much time to dedicate to reading. Steady progress is the name of the game for stuff like this.

Worst case, you've killed a bunch of time during the wait for Hong Lu's canto (because oh boy, I have a feeling this one's gonna be a wait) and you are able to gain a better appreciation for canto 8 by understanding some of the nicher bits of how it adapts stuff from the source.

Best case, you really enjoy reading it and end up like a bunch of the Hong Lu fans I know who were permanently changed by reading this book and started reading scholarly analysis of it for fun (or start seeking out every adaptation of it you can find, or read the book 5 times over... I am coming to realize this book does something to people.)

This book is legitimately incredibly good, even outside the context of me reading it because I was very invested in that beautiful cyan freak from a game I like. I might not have been able to get through it without Limbus providing me the push to keep going on days where I really didn't want to read, but it's a legitimate interest of mine now I will seek out information on regardless of its connection to Limbus! Trust me when I say it's worth getting through even if it feels hard or tedious.

(and if it helps- a solid amount of the stuff I feel is most likely to be Limbus relevant happens near the end of the book. There's so much in this book so things that could be relevant are scattered throughout almost all of it, but I've been picking up so many end of the book vibes from stuff we've seen lately. so you've got to get there!!)

[callmearcturus]

OKAY I'M AWAKE, actually i woke up like 2.5 hours ago, tried really hard to go back to sleep but was mostly thinking about the ending of that game lmao

I don't know if I'm interested in playing The Answer because it's locked to male PC only and by now I am extremely invested in my FeMC. If I had to play an Epilogue that was about a dude who didn't even have the option of having social links with half the cast, I don't know if I'd be invested. But Storm informed me that per the Answer, the PC is in a perma-coma to ward off Nyx and Aigis and some others are trying to find a way to save them so they can have a normal life. .

I'm torn between the fact that I called the fact the PC would die at the end and the reason they would die (mostly) ages ago, so that part was forecasted, with my confusion on why the game just.... gave me more time? Like, I don't understand the Why of "why did the PC come back, live for another month, then fall into a perma-coma." Why did that not just happen when she became the Great Seal to start with. That's really not explained and it's not super clear that she's even dying until the scene where it happens, on the roof with Aigis. .

On the other hand, i do like the resolutions that I got. Junpei and Chidori will find each other, Akihiko is eagerly waiting for Shinjiro to come back, Fuuka is preparing to be more social and leader-ly in the final year, all the little tie-ups with everyone. It's good! I do like that. .

I guess I feel like because they didn't Just Do It and kill the PC when the Great Seal happens, it... cheapened the ending a bit for me? The glimmer of hope offered at the end that's taken away just seems weird to me. Because at that point, because that hope was set up and everything was literally normal for a MONTH, why is that being yanked out from under me, yanno? .

In my head, the real ending is FeMC mentally relinquishes the Universe arcana and loses her memory like everyone else (sans Aigis). Shinjiro comes home from the hospital. Akihiko takes a gap year before college to take care of his boyfriend and girlfriend while they recover. Mitsuru tries to run her company but has a creeping feeling of unease about everything, causing her her research the company's past with Yukari. They find out about the HUNDRED KIDS and dissolve the Group and maybe go rebuild their lives in another country altogether. Chidori finds Junpei as he's working some weekend job at the Mall and asks him out on the spot. Fuuka invents Discord and makes millions. .

Despite all that: it's still a fucking great game. As someone who failed out of P4, I devoured this one and liked it a lot more. On the queer front, I vastly prefer this kind of dated media that basically does everything except say gay than the No Homo of P4. It was really welcoming and nice. I might play it again someday, but this time skip the Hierophant link and focus on Yukari and Mitsuru now that I know I like them. Good, coherent, fun, heartfelt game! I did cry at the big finale! Akihiko for best boy!

That's it for now! If you wanna read my whole liveblog, it is tagged appropriately. I would add /chrono to the end of the URL and start from the top so you can see my hiiiiiilarious experience with Ryoji in chronological order.

ETA: GOD YANNO WHAT MAKES EVEN MORE SENSE would be FeMC falling into a coma every full moon as she wards off Nyx. but whatever, what do I know.

ETA2: I said on discord "i still really like the game, i think it's shockingly well written, the cast is great, it's heartfelt and has actual things to say about life and death but i would have preferred either just kill the player off and let the tragedy be how she's forgotten, that's tasty or just let them live at that point, i feel like the message about the inevitability of death is made"

[neuxue]

okay unfortunately now I must ask. fei du for the blorbo game based on what you know of him so far. if you're really really bored color-code with one color of "based on what I know" and another color for "where I think priest is going with him (trauma)"

oh man okay let's see. The thing I do know for sure about him is that he is extremely blorbo-shaped. Otherwise it's red string on a corkboard but I have some Theories. (or perhaps just fervent hopes).

I'm a little ahead of where my not-really-liveblogging is because I queue the posts to space them out a little but from still pretty early in Macbeth:

(blue is what I have seen so far; grey is where I think we're going)

Okay! I shall endeavour to explain myself:

He has a similar intensity thing going on as Sheng Lingyuan. Namely, if you just take some of his on-paper actions or statements (and some of what's been hinted) he should be much further up the scale but he doesn't always present that way and I have...suspicions.

There's a very fine dotted line around Just Like Me and once again we should just not look too closely at that or at 'symptoms of projection' (it's probably not the trauma and sadly not the wealth) but there are elements of his characterisation and specifically his relationship to self-analysis, self-adjustment, mimicry, and the concepts of morality and taboo and socially constructed frameworks that are thus far presented in a way that I find refreshingly nuanced and sympathetic.

Does Fei Du count as an orphan? Debatable, but I figure it's even odds on his father surviving.

I stared at 'frequently violent' for a while and I think it'll depend on how exactly we define violence and whether pulling the wings off of flies (so to speak) counts if you're not doing it by choice, but also I think he certainly could and would be if that was the necessary and pragmatic option, so.

On the other hand I don't actually think he's killed anyone, and we're getting into extremely tenuously-supported speculation but I think that despite the way he talks about death and killing, despite the way he half-tauntingly almost invites that kind of suspicion in how he talks about his father (or toys with his respirator), and despite the way he doesn't seem to have the kind of deep-rooted revulsion towards it that many do, I think he might in fact go to not-insignificant lengths to avoid actually killing someone. This is entirely based on my tentative thinking that perhaps a part of his fascination with/understanding and study of the kinds of things typically considered 'monstrous' stems from the lack of instinctive revulsion as well as from experiences like what we see in the flashback in ch58 and a certain form of ruthless introspection that leads him to the belief, true or otherwise, that he could be or become that, and a desire not to. (I said this elsewhere but a lot of what he says in book2 in particular makes me wonder if there's an element of... how easy it could be to go from 'I can understand the way a monster thinks' to 'therefore I am monstrous')

Pets stray animals - okay thus far 'pets' is not exactly the verb I'd use for what happens in that flashback, and it's probably generous to apply it to Luo Yiguo, but we'll just see where it goes.

I think he might be slightly more protagonist of life than he lets on, mostly because he dropped all those hints early on about 'hm it seems like maybe someone's fucking with you' to Luo Wenzhou, and there sure are a lot of coincidences, and also moments like his making it very obvious that he's taken advantage of the Zhou family's troubles to short their stock (or, again, toying with his father's respirator when there's CCTV in the room) that read almost like deliberately trying to draw someone's attention. Also the books, which just so happen to relate to the cases that he just so happens to be involved in... yeah, there's a bigger picture here and he's in it somewhere.

awful company/ray of sunshine and hated by all/loved by all: just depends on who's in the room and what he wants from them. He is very good at adjusting his presentation to suit his audience and his desired outcomes, as multiple characters have noticed and Luo Wenzhou has lamented.

Trauma: he clearly has a lot! I think he has more than that.

sadistic/helps others: It's Complicated. There was that little thing where he told his secretary to do some corporate social responsibility around the rescue of Wang Xiujuan and then he casually mentions that some company has set up a fund for people like her? And there are moments of almost surprising gentleness from him (Sheng Lingyuan vibes again honestly), and while I'm not sure if it's for fun exactly he does spend his spare time helping solve crimes and buying the overworked team lunch. I'm not sure he would agree with my assessment. And I could also very easily read him as a sadist but not in a way that's necessarily opposite of 'helps others' if you see what I mean.

In terms of the 'what I want for him': Fei Du what is your deal, what is your damage. Like. It's apparent already just from the way things have been set up (and from other experience of priest's works) that there is going to be some Trauma, and that it is going to be Extensive, but I just. Want it. I want it to be worse than whatever I have imagined and I want it to be surprising in some way and I want it to knock me to the floor. Also I'd like him to have some nice things maybe, as a treat. And I'd like at least once to see him... unleashed, unrestrained, allowed to expose and use the sharpest edges of himself to their full extent and potential.

He also feels like someone for whom The Realisation in some form would be delicious

And consequences are good on almost any character but especially those who pride themselves on (or rely on, or define themselves by) extreme levels of willpower and self-control and by extension their ability to control most situations or complex large-scale games. The kind that works really, really well.... right up until it doesn't. Pair that with a realisation that maybe some of the collateral damage is less acceptable to them than they thought it would be, and you have a recipe for something exquisite. I want that.

And in the time it took to write this I could instead have just read the next couple of chapters but see the ticked box of 'meta-posting on main'.

[izzet-league-mad-scientist]

Alright, so now that it seems I'm actually going to be using my tumblr for the first real time since I created it 3 years ago, I've gotta start with something. And honestly, what better way to inaugurate my introduction to the Homestuck fandom at large and to spur on some interaction than to state my opinions on the infamous spider girl herself, Vriska Serket. I'm sure that this is a flawless idea that will have no consequences whatsoever.

I suppose this train of thought begins with something I realized when desperately pawing through liveblogs for someone whose homestuck experience was similar to my own. Specifically, by figuring out which blogs I liked and which I did not, I narrowed down what my own opinions were by process of elimination. It started with simply those who were unenthusiastic or frustrated at the mysteries of the comic, shortly before I also nixed those who vehemently hated any of the trolls for their intrinsic character traits (If I had a nickel for every blog that posted a huge essay-rant about how Gamzee's willful ignorance is the worst thing to ever exist, an intrinsic moral flaw, and completely opposite to anything civilized, I'd have two nickels). When I got to Vriska's introduction, however, I really figured out what was going on.

As always, reading liveblogs, watching livereads, or really any media form of re-experiencing a favorite through others, is about finding your own emotions mirrored in someone else, vicariously re-experiencing the emotions you felt upon your first experience with the topic. And to that end; I could finally pin down my own opinions on dear Vriska.

Vriska, to me, is a deeply tragic character. She's been traumatized and manipulated and used since her youth, and the scars and coping mechanisms she developed from all of that lead her to only repeat the cycles of violence, running others and herself into the ground. While of course I hated her upon introduction, you'd be pretty heartless not to, it quickly turned to feeling bad for her upon further information. It becomes clear pretty quickly that all of her terrible actions are consequences themselves of what she's been through and the worldviews she's developed to cope with that.

Her complex about being strong vs being weak follows pretty directly from her upbringing; she had to be stronger than other strolls, the strongest, even, to keep spidermom fed, and to avoid injury herself she had to go after the weakest other trolls. And she's doing them a favor, really, 8ecause if she was weak then she'd 8e eaten herself; so really she's just saving them the trou8le of dying in a worse way! She can't bring herself to feel real remorse for her actions, because if she ever does then she'd be crushed under everything she's done. And I mean really, this is a 13 year old who's killed hundreds of other children since she was like 8, that's not something that she can just accept without shattering. And as always, she's just doing what she has to to survive, so in her mind it was always necessary. She falls into the trap that deeply hurt characters often do, in that she only sees one option that isn't weakness or death, and becomes blind to any other way.

I would never say that Vriska has done nothing wrong, because she very obviously has, in so many ways. But a character doesn't need to be free of all wrongdoing to be worth sympathy, even if you don't forgive them. And that's what I was looking for in livebloggers, that peculiar combination of hate and pity (hah) that has always been my experience with her. I just want her to have a happy ending, not to forget what she's done but to atone and feel remorse and finally be able to be at peace with herself. She almost gets that after years in the dream bubbles pre-retcon, after being forced to accept that she doesn't have anything more to do, after finally being free of any plans or webs, of having all of her irons out of the fire and firmly out of reach. But of course, we don't see any more of that after Terezi:Remem8er.

Either way, she's a uniquely compelling character in her own right, one I might even give a similar pedestal to Zuko in How To Write a Sympathetic Bad Guy. Unlike Zuko's archetypal and fantastic redemption, her story and arc is meandering and erratic, her actions grey and her morals suspect, even at the end of the story. But it is truly masterful to have such an organic character, one who flouts conventions and simplicity so regularly, become such a presence in a fandom as to be known even to those who don't know anything else about Homestuck.