#Paradoxical Webcomic

[welcometogrouchland]

I've been binging Batman Beyond recently (Terry ily so much) and thought about how- bc of the JLU twist which I think isn't even canon to the comics BB verse but shhh bare with me- he'd technically be Damian's half brother??? Which is just so ridiculously soap opera to me. I need them to interact in a silly time travel adventure so bad you don't even understand (ID in alt)

[wronghands1]

[niiikooooo]

05v2// Super Fighting Robot

[rynmaru]

Went to Legion Space. Might have met NHP God.

[goinghomecomic]

Going Home - Chapter 3 - Pg 58

(BEGINNING) - (NEXT)

[multiverserift]

I solved the Fermi Paradox. You know, the question "if the probability for aliens is so high, where are they?" One of the newer contestants is the so-called "Dark Forest" theory. It basically says we're surrounded by nightmare predators, and everyone who makes themselves known gets instantly eaten. It's a grim, predatory capitalist interpretation. There are of course more. Dark answers (because civilizations always crumble and fail), hopeful ones (because we are the first out there and ahead of us is a golden age of possibility, exploration and wonder)

There is also the theory that earth is simply a protected place. A museum. A zoo. A lab. A meat farm. I propose a better theory:

Seriously, if you want meat and have a galaxy faring civilization, you can propably grow meat in tubes 'n stuff. What can we as humans do very well? Earth is a ressource of culture, art and stories. We have been called "pan narrans", the storytelling ape (Pratchett, Cohen, Stewart). What we do best is tell stories and put them into neat, beautiful, horrendous or mentally exhausting little packets. Written stories, pictures, games. So basically, we don't see any aliens because they all desperately wait for Half Life 3.

[oz-paradox]

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[dragonfireartstudios]

RELEASE DATE ANNOUNCEMENT

[monokromeparadox]

♦ MonoKrome Paradox Chapter 4 ♦

Jan Tre update of MonoKrome Paradox. All rights reserved.

Previous Chapters: 1 || 2 || 3

[custardfist]

DEAD SPACE 🛰

Damn you, Fermi, with your paradox and all. 🙄

[thewertsearch]

GG: yaaaaaay!!! GA: Youll Need Somewhere To Keep Them While They Grow

Vriska would approve.

Also, I hope that water's fresh.

GG: so what is the actual purpose of all this breeding? GG: am i trying to make one really special frog with just the right genetic code or something? GG: sort of like the ULTIMATE FROG :O GA: Actually GA: Yes GA: Thats Exactly What Youre Doing […] GA: Your Objective Is To Breed The Genesis Frog

The Genesis Frog - a phrase I’m willing to bet is capitalized even without Kanaya’s quirk - would fit right in with Bilious Slick's other titles.

I think Jade's literally trying to create Slick, or an iteration of him, and that deriving his genome is crucial to the session's endgame. He's been haunting us for thousands of pages, and his importance is nothing less than absolute.

GA: You Cant Complete The Game Without Doing So GA: Your Entire Mission Depends On Breeding Him

Finally.

Come on, Kanaya, play ball with me here.

What is the purpose of Bilious Slick, the Genesis Frog?

GG: what do we do after i make this big god froggy? GG: does it have something to do with the new universe we create? GA: Most Certainly

...oh my fucking god.

Oh my FUCKING god.

She's deadass, isn't she? She's not being figurative, allegorical or metaphorical. Kanaya is literally saying that if you zoom out far enough from a universe, you'll see Bilious Slick's beady eyes staring back at you. The true shape of reality is a thing that croaks.

This is why Derse hates him. He's a symbol of Player victory, and Derse's entire raison d'etre is to oppose the Players. The amphibian civil war was signalling the opposing Carapacian attitudes to the creation of a universe.

This is why Aradia associates Slick with probability. He contains all possibilities because he's made of Paradox Space.

This is why Vriska was so surprised that John found one in his Land. Creating frogs is an endgame quest, and her own Space Player took weeks to make progress in cloning them.

The Forge hasn't even entered yet, and John's already holding one of the ancestors of his nascent universe.

And this the answer to the Great Frog Riddle. It's why Slick stands at the peak of every Sburb Temple - because he is its genesis, its purpose and its prize.

Bilious Slick is more than a god – he’s a space for gods to fill.

It's shit like this that makes Homestuck my favorite webcomic of all. The Ultimate Reward - the grand prize of reality's great game - is a fucking frog.

[rynmaru]

Burn The Web

[town-darling]

homestar runner (the collection of animated videos created using flash) is not a webcomic, but homestar runner (the website, consisting of said animated videos but also written dialogue, games, and other activities) is a webcomic

[nekropsii]

Wait, wdym Sollux is dubiously cannon transmasc?? I didn't notice it in the comic and now I'm curious. Where does it say it???/gen

You didn’t notice it in the comic because it was not in the comic. No big deal there.

For Clarification: “Dubiously Canon” means “Extra-Canonical* Official Material”, and is applied to anything that is not the original webcomic - so, Homestuck^2, The Epilogues, Comments + Commentaries, Hiveswap, Paradox Space, etc. It marks works as Non-Canonical as a baseline, but with the caveat that you can choose to accept it as true within your own mental image of the story as a concept. Basically, it isn’t real - and doesn’t have to be - unless you personally decide to add it to your headcanon, which then makes it real for you, specifically. This is the Official Definition of that term, and the Official Application of it. It is also why anyone that argues any Homestuck work aside from Homestuck proper is 100% Canon and everyone needs to accept it as such is being pretty silly - they are blatantly disregarding the labels these works have devised and applied to themselves specifically to separate themselves from the actual original comic.

Sollux being implied to be Transmasc was in some old Hussie posts, particularly a joke one sent to some internal Pesterquest Discord, where she says something to the effect of Eridan envying Sollux because his dad doesn’t deadname or misgender him. Dubious Canon, and also some deeply funny clowning, especially when you remember Eridan’s Lusus is a fucking Seahorse with zero concept of this shit. World’s First Transphobic Dog.

It wasn’t in the comic, but I like it, so it’s true to me.

He named himself fucking Solluxander. 10/10.

*The prefix “Extra-” means “Outside”, and is not a denotation of large quantities. I am saying that this is Outside of Canon, not Extremely Canon.

[utopianparadoxist]

On Fighting Nothing - Ultimate Dirk in the Struggle Against The End of Homestuck

[ Edited Excerpt from Through Loving Eyes--Who Is(n't) Dirk Strider?]

You and I have been through this, have been through that, have been at ease. Nothing scares me more than God, and Nothing cannot sustain.

Let's consider this verse from the Homestuck: Beyond Canon album song, The Leaving, as it might relate to the Epilogue's Ultimate Dirk Strider and the nature of his character arc.

It’s a well known fact from the days of Bladekindeyewear (who’s back and occasionally liveblogging HS² on Tumblr, if you’re interested) that The Neverending Story is a major source of thematic inspiration for Homestuck, with the twin ouroboros symbol from the movie appearing in several places in the comic connected to Cherub lore, including their mating rituals, which are said to tap into the innermost essences of Paradox Space.

If you don’t remember the Neverending Story, its a book/movie about the magic realm of Fantastica, an infinite realm of fantasy and wonder living inside an in-fiction book also named the Neverending Story, which is experienced by all who read it. Our protagonist Bastian reads the book, and inside lives a story where the protagonist Atreyu is sent on a quest to try to overcome the threat of the mysterious force called the Nothing, which is bent on consuming the entire fictional world.

The Nothing of the Leaving, then, is a literary reference. What scares Dirk more than God is not “nothing” in the sense that he’s unafraid of God, but instead the specific darkness of non-existence that overtakes the realm of Fantastica, obliterating it completely, reducing it so utterly that there’s not even dust left behind.

And what turns out to be the source of the Nothing in the Neverending Story?

The inevitable apocalypse that comes for all stories: The thump of the cover as you turn the last page. The moment when a living narrative passes from the reader’s experience and turns into an immediately fading memory. Whether it happens quickly or slowly, everyone who’s loved any story eventually moves on.

And that is precisely the armageddon that has struck Earth C at the beginning of the Epilogues. Seven years out from the end of the comic, it is a world almost entirely forgotten, populated by people that we almost don’t even recognize as the characters we loved.

Dirk and his friends struggled through the entire labyrinthine nightmare that is the plot of the webcomic Homestuck to reach their happy ending, and almost as soon as they got there, nearly the entire community of readers that shared the journey with them abandoned them and moved on.

One world burned up in fire (Beta Earth). One world silenced by psychic death scream (Alternia). One world drowned and boiled under water (Alpha Earth). And now? A fourth world, Earth C, doomed to death by simply being forgotten, extinguished in its cradle because it wasn’t loved enough. Gone not with a bang, but with a whisper.

That is the nature of Homestuck’s fourth and (so far) final apocalypse.

And striving against that fate, watching all of their friends and loved ones succumb to the dark like a beloved horse…we have Rose Lalonde and Dirk Strider. Our platonic (in the literal sense) Adam and Eve at the end of the world. So what else is there for them to do, except to bite the apple?

To Ascend, though it is terrible.

THE LION EATING THE SUN — THE FLAME OF SCORPIO

The only way to fight against Darkness is to Light it with a torch, and the ultimate torch is the Sun. Yaldabaoth, the denizen with the symbol of Light placed upon its head, is also the denizen shared by Caliborn and Dirk. Mythologically, Yaldabaoth is a satanic Demiurge or creator God, analogous to the God of Biblical scripture but either flawed or evil, depending on who’s talking about him.

Caliborn, who goes on to dominate the plot of Homestuck to the point of being responsible for the existence of the Alpha Timeline, and thus the plot of Homestuck itself, is decidedly the evil variety of Demiurge, ruling over the rest of the cast of Homestuck through brutality and death and reveling in every drop of the blood he spills.

And let’s make no mistake: Dirk, already consumed by the process of ascending to Ultimate Self, carries with him the risk of advancing and carrying on Caliborn’s legacy.

Lord English, Doc Scratch, the Soul-infested version of Lil Cal — all three of these entities carry Dirk’s Soul inside them, and so they can potentially count as splinters. And all three excel at manipulating and controlling unaware parties into carrying out their goals, such as Lil Cal corrupting Bro’s training of Dave, or Doc Scratch exploiting and weaponizing Vriska.

In the roiling oceans of Dirk’s ultimate self, how can we really tell who is the puppet and who is the puppeteer? We can’t. But we can tell that so far, Ultimate Dirk doesn’t exactly operate the way Caliborn did. Like the Demiurge in Timaeus’ Testimony, he insists on at least a veneer of nobility, even if he’s flawed or imperfect at it, claiming he’s only doing what needs to be done. And notably, Dirk doesn’t physically hurt a single person throughout the Epilogues.

It’s under this logic that he chooses to take on the role of antagonist, deliberately raising the stakes of his reality high enough to kick the story of Homestuck back into motion. He does this while actively knowing he’s signing up to be executed, preferably by Dave in his opinion, but certainly by someone else otherwise — Kanaya being another likely contender.

Either way, it makes the entire antagonistic enterprise one long suicide attempt on his part. Dirk may not have given up on Homestuck’s future, but in deciding to be willing to fight for it, he has given up on his own life.

It is, in essence if not intentionally, the bargain of the Flame Of Scorpio.

“The Scorpion killed other bugs and ate them. Then one day, the weasel found him. The scorpion fled, and fell into a deep well. He thought to himself: ‘How long have I eaten other creatures? And yet, the one time that I was the prey, I fled in utter terror. And look what came of that. I’ll die in this well, alone. I could have given the weasel another day of life with my sacrifice. But now my death will help no one. I’m useless. Dear Lord, I beg of you, look into my Heart and hear my prayer. In my next life, don’t let me waste myself. Let me use my body for the true happiness of everyone in the world. And then the scorpion burst into flame. A brilliant crimson glow. And by the light of his burning body, he lit up the night forever.’

— Night on the Galactic Railroad

It’s a covenant with God, a kind of magic whereby a scorpion — an entity that hurts and consumes by its nature, a Natural Antagonist, if you will — sacrifices itself to light up the night sky. A sacrifice that is depicted in 2011’s Mawaru Penguindrum’s homage to Night on the Galactic Railroad beautifully succintly with the act of…

Tearing one's heart out.

You sent me FIRE. FIRE, I’ll tear my throat out. Burn my blackened lips. You gave me FIRE!

Fire, I’ll tear my Heart out. I’d rather tear my Heart out... But I can’t stay here! --The Leaving, Homestuck Beyond Canon

If this seems familiar conceptually, it might be because it's a very similar logic to the one adopted by Vriska Serket in the original Homestuck comic, who adamantly believed that since she’s taken so many lives, she can only justify her existence by Rising Up and defeating Lord English for the benefit of everyone in Homestuck.

Vriska throws herself into the role of Hero/Protagonist, while Dirk throws himself into the role of Villain/Antagonist, but they do so with the same kind of fanatic quasi-religious zeal: That by embracing their own sharper features and committing to sacrificing for the greater good, they can make things better for everybody else.

And so Dirk commits his biggest and most obvious gesture of antagonism: He kidnaps Rose Lalonde, taking her with him on his journey to start a new session. In the process he moves her soul into a (frankly sickass) robot that he claims can withstand the infinite processing power necessary to hold her Ultimate Self, which her physical body can’t sustain.

While whether or not that’s true remains to be seen, this move has been deemed highly unpopular by the fandom, to say the least. Yet there’s a logic to why he had to do it. If Dirk had said fuck it, taken his ball and fucked off the planet on his own, what would’ve happened?

His friends and the fandom would’ve collectively gone “Weird move, but go off I guess?” and collectively moved on without a second thought. Dirk simply doesn’t carry the emotional weight to carry an entire narrative with the question of whether or not he gets a happy ending. He just has the sort of personality that inclines us to go “Probably not, but oh well. Sort of the dude’s own fault anyway.”

But Rose? Everybody loves Rose. Everybody fucking loves Rosemary! There’s nothing the Homestuck fandom wants more in the world than for those two girls to be happy together. If Rose isn’t okay, we’re not okay, and that’s exactly what Dirk needs: Something to be so wrong in the world that we can’t help but keep watching, in the hopes that eventually, someday, it will be set right again.

Rose is the very Sun Dirk has stolen in the process of making a Narrator-Demiurge of himself. She is the guiding Star that leads to the future, the very Light of Homestuck.

And look, Dirk gets a lot of flack for the whole Rose-snatching thing, but let’s put something into perspective here. In the epilogues, Rose is dying, or suffering so much she may as well be dying. Dirk may or may not be exploiting or undermining Rose’s agency, but his Rosebot innovation for her does end her immediate excruciating pain.

Ultimately, Rosebot agrees with Dirk about taking this course of action, deliberately thanking him for taking her with him and expressing her own feelings on the importance of their cause before Dirk succumbs to his temptation to eke out a hollow victory over his loneliness by using his narrative powers to encourage her eagerness.

While there are secrets being kept and the power dynamic is unbalanced, Dirk and Rose are not abuser and victim in this venture — they are co-conspirators. Remember that Rose, too, has a role to play.

If Dirk is the dragon, the damnable villain, then she is the princess in the tower, the damsel in distress. It’s in both of their mutual interests for her to play to an attitude of relative innocence and ignorance for the audience’s benefit.

The better to keep us watching.

[oz-paradox]

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