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homespork-review · 4 years ago

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...ouch, John.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHEL: Both. Both is good!

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

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

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

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

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

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

WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 14

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

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

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

CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 17 WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 17

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Watch on YouTube

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GET ON WITH IT!: 18

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

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

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

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

Wow.

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

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

CHEL: Dave inquires about the wizard story.

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

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

ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 16

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wait for it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 17

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 18

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

HURRY UP AND DO NOTHING: 7

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 19

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HURRY UP AND DO NOTHING: 9

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Watch on YouTube

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 19

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

BRIGHT: She can apparently smell and taste photons.

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

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

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

Watch on YouTube

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

CHEL: Yet more cartoon physics around the Strider bros.

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

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

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

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

BRIGHT: That makes a lot more sense!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 18

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

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

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

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

The babies vanish through the defence portals to Earth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And another letter from Jade.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They line up for a fight.

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

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

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

HURRY UP AND DO NOTHING: 10

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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chongoblog · 6 years ago

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Hey I know that you all see me as the Grand Authority on Movie Opinions in that I am correct and can never be wrong and also my opinion on things is NEVER unsolicited because I’m literally the most important person on the internet and you CRAVE my opinions.

So I saw Shazam last night and I’m gonna talk about it under this readmore because I dunno how long it’s gonna be and I respect y’all’s dashes like that (plus if y’all don’t care abt what I thought then you can keep scrolling). There will be spoilers but I will clearly mark them.

So I’ve been thinking to myself on whether or not Shazam was the best DCEU movie. All things considered, it didn’t have too high of a bar to leap over, seeing how Wonder Woman, which was originally my favorite, had a lot of incredible moments, but was bogged down by a few of the scenes around those moments and a frankly terrible final act. And if I were to put it into numbers, (which people seem to love) I’d put Wonder Woman at about 50% INCREDIBLE 20% ehhhh and 30% GOD WHY, plus add a few bonus points for being so inspiring within its social context as a female-led superhero movie that isn’t terrible, sexualized or both. Shazam, on the other hand, doesn’t get those bonus points of social context, but has about a 60% Pretty Good and 40% ehhhh with one small bonus point for having one scene that personally hit me pretty hard that I’ll talk about later. It doesn’t reach any of the LOWS that any other film in the DCEU had, but at the same time, it didn’t really hit any of the highs either.

Something that’s worth addressing is that as someone who likes to partake in any and all drama because I’m a gremlin who loves seeing complaining, I saw plenty of DC fans complain that this movie was falling into a sort of trap set up saying “ITS ONLY BEING LIGHTHEARTED BECAUSE IT THINKS THAT IT HAS TO BE MORE LIKE MARVEL AND THATS WHY MORE PEOPLE LIKE IT” and I do want to address that because it’s a stupid argument. While Shazam is a departure from the DCEU’s more serious tone thus far, it’s not a black and white deal. DC isn’t strictly defined by being “the more serious Marvel” or vice versa. Being lighthearted did help Shazam out, not BECAUSE it was more like a Marvel movie, but because unlike movies like Batman v Superman, it didn’t try (and fail) to tackle more complex themes and down to earth schemes that made it lose focus and become an enormous mess. That being said, Shazam’s schemes and themes were much simpler, and it made for a much SMALLER mess if/when it did lose focus.

Before I dive into the spoilers, I’ll give my two cents on the film as a whole. Like I mentioned, the light-hearted tone did help out the movie, and it took itself a little less seriously with things while still balancing out some emotion in the story, and the whole theme behind it, while not PERFECTLY drawn out, still had a coherent message behind it. Visually, the movie was definitely trying to break out of the Zack Snyder mold that had been set up back with Man Of Steel, and while it still chills out in Low Saturation City a lot of the time, it IS doing a better job. Zachary Levi definitely deserves a shoutout in this movie for probably being the second best actor in the DCEU closely behind Gal Gadot in terms of casting choices, perfectly encapsulating the idea of Shazam, and pulling off the role of a Big Billy Batson, however he seems to have taken away the acting talent from half of the rest of the cast, because some of the acting in this movie is.....not great. And that’s not counting the child actors who did alright considering they’re child actors (Freddy in particular was fantastic).

The dialogue in this is pretty solid and indicative of the situation, and they really tried to lean into the idea that it’s some middle school (or early high I cant really remember) kid who just got these powers, and they do a pretty good job of that in both the dialogue and in the first half of the movie. And like I mentioned, there is a bit of Emotion in this movie that they really tried to deliver and they did a pretty good job delivering it. That being said, it’s very clear that they’re going for a kinda cheesy sort of vibe. Which makes sense, since the concept is Kid Becomes Superhero, which is ripe for picking like some kind of Cheese Tree....orchard.....thing.....and it leads to just a fun experience. It’s something that knows it shouldn’t be taken too seriously, which is why I’m writing an incredibly long analytical review of it, because I’m a curmudgeon like that.

ALRIGHT SPOILER TIME SCROLL DOWN TO THE VERY BOTTOM IF YOU DONT WANNA GET SPOILED

Lol alright so this spoiler section is gonna have a lot of negative points, so let me start with some positives.

The overall theme of this movie is sort of an idea of Found Family (which I’m an absolute sucker for), and there’s a subplot that follows this idea where Billy is looking for his mom. The movie starts showing a flashback where Billy’s mom gives him a compass saying “it’ll always help you find your way home” and then very shortly afterward, Billy gets himself seperated from his mother and had to be put into foster care and is now searching for his mother by looking everywhere he can to the point it causes him to run away multiple times. It’s not too surprising how this ends, with him finding his mother, only to find out that she just didn’t pick him up because she was 17 at the time and felt she COULDN’T take care of him. And that’s the point when he realizes “maybe my REAL family were the kids in the foster home all along”. Billy Batson sees that his birth mother’s life is tumultuous, taking on new lovers, working part time jobs, and not having time to even consider caring for Billy, moreso just hoping he turned out alright. Billy, as a sort of symbolic gesture, hands his mother the compass saying “you’ll need this more than me”. And then she replies with two words that just killed me for some reason.

“What’s this?”

I don’t know. It was a line that hit me. Kinda reflecting that sort of disconnect. Alright enough being nice, let’s talk things that are Alright but could be better.

The villain was alright. His character was pretty fun at the beginning, but after he got revenge on his father for Toxic Masculinity™ he became pretty boring, acting more like a CGI Monster Vending Machine. Of course it kinda leads into the whole Cheesy vibe they were going for, but it’s hard to make your movie seem like it’s gonna be campy and cheesy when your villain doesn’t really fall into the role once he actually fights the hero (also with the color palette). Just wish they would’ve sorta gone full Sam Raimi and just leaned into the campiness, with this movie kinda afraid to jump into the pool past its bathing suit.

And then there was the climax of the movie in the carnival, where I felt like it went a little bit downhill, not really being the best that it could be, but still pretty serviceable. The director seemed to be REALLY into using slo-mo, using it a little more than necessary to the point of being distracting, and while the Shazam concept was used in a few fun creative ways, there were some moments where it could have had more utility, or one moment in particular when he absolutely needed to change back and probably had time to say “Shazam” like twenty times over, but he didn’t, which was a LITTLE frustrating, but that’s way more nitpicky. Speaking of nitpicks, there were a few shots that were.....questionable (most notably the Santa.....moment? It seemed to be a clear funny moment, but it didn’t really land and didn’t flow either)

And also the climax has a bit of a fun twist moment that helps round out the Found Family moment where all of Billy’s adopted family also become superheroes, which is pretty sweet, but there was one SMALL nitpick that doesn’t overwhelmingly detract from anything but I found strange. Every character had a power, with one person showing the super strength, another showing super speed, another with lightning, another with flying, which were Shazam’s powers. And then Mary was there....and we don’t really get to see her powers? I did research and apparently she’s a character in the comics with all the powers of Shazam, but Mary was one of the only other characters with an arc and we don’t get to see her with any powers, which is a bit weird (we also don’t get to see her arc formally conclude. We can draw conclusions but still). So in the end it looks like Mary essentially kinda got Kairi’d. Oof.

But that’s really it for spoilers, in terms of the “bad” it’s really just that it didn’t really give it enough of an impact and while it knew what it wanted to be and isn’t disingenuous about it, it also doesn’t really commit to BEING what it wants to be.

ALRIGHT SPOILERS ARE ALL DONE YOU CAN LOOK NOW HERES MY BOTTOM LINE

Bottom line is that this movie is definitely flawed, and after consideration I don’t think I’d put it at the top of the DCEU, if only because Wonder Woman reached higher points than this one did, but that shouldn’t be a slight against Shazam at all. Heck, I would consider putting it a little bit above Captain Marvel if we’re inevitably comparing rivals.

So all in all I give it a Shazam/10. A good fun time. Not the BEST movie you’ll see this year, but you’re there to have a good time and you’ll have it.

#reviews i guess #dang im really just writing a review #ah well #shazam #dceu

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vidoxi · 8 years ago

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just finished mystic messenger and i just wanna write down my thoughts. major spoiler warning + i-might-talk-shit-about-your-fav warning. if you want to discuss with me any of the points i bring up here, go for it.

Jaehee “No Homo” Kang

so when i first heard that her route was just a friendship route i was hella disappointed and thought that sounded like a total bullshit cop out, but after playing it i feel a little differently. i think it makes sense for jaehee’s character and narrative that she would value a friend over a relationship at that point in her life, but also its pretty clearly said that she does have romantic feelings for you but she needs time to process them, which is especially understandable since you can infer that before she met you she thought she was straight and also she’s catholic. her after ending was the perfect time for her to confess or for there to be the implication that you two are in a relationship, but instead it’s the only after ending where we DONT get to see interaction between you and your partner, which is a bullshit cop out. i do like that in the christmas DLC things got a little more romantic but i’m still wanting more. jaehee and the fans deserve what the male characters get, a CG of a kiss on the lips and a confession of romantic love. i hope that if more DLC gets released, cheritz will push the envelope a little a lot more. but i have heard that korea is still really conservative and for all i know making it more explicit could be illegal so i might be being unnecessarily harsh there lol;;

about her actual route though... it was good. nothing really exciting happened. it was definitely the chillest route i thought, but it was really sweet and she’s absolutely adorable and it warmed me to her a lot. her bad ending 1 (the one where you end up with zen) is so depressing, fucking hell. it feels like you betray her. it’s so ugly. ;_; i never want to do that ending and i’m glad there isnt a unique CG to tempt me into it either. her bad ending 2 (where you push her to work so hard that she ends up in the hospital) is pretty terrible too. after ending was hella cute though, i love the thought of mc and jaehee having their little coffee shop together and jaehee getting to actually work on something she’s interested in and being with her “best friend” all the time. oh and yoosung becoming jumin’s new assistant was interesting and i need me some fics, u feel?

something i also feel a little robbed about is that jaehee never blew up at jumin. she drags yoosung like theres no tomorrow and you just know she could say some venomous shit about jumin so i was hoping there’d be a big confrontation between them where she gets a dramatic The Reason You Suck-type speech but there wasnt really a moment like that.

however, seeing jumin all bitter about it at the end was a little gratifying (sorry jumin)

i love their emojis and you cant stop me from using them

also on this route where 707 has yoosung hunting for the LOLOL expansion pack (how is this boy so naive? im worried) and he finds a buried picture of rika’s dog sally instead, i at first thought that he had dug up sally’s corpse and i was like “wtf the fuck seven”

also wtf @ v saying he has terminal cancer. this is presumably a lie, right? before reading the secret endings i thought he was going to commit suicide but now im thinking that (seriously if you havent played the whole game you need to stop reading this rn) maybe he knew that rika was going to dispose of him soon and he didnt want jumin to investigate his disappearance? iirc yoosung’s good ending is the only one that he’s present in, so is it meant to be assumed that he’s killed off camera in every route possibly?

everyone else under the cut

Zen

the worst tbh. i dont like saying it but there it is. possibly this depends on who you are as a person but to me it didnt really feel like MC and zen had much chemistry except during that scene where youre on his roof together. most of your interactions are just you praising him and fellating his already huge ego. and jaehee was exceptionally annoying with all her “muh zens reputation” shit and feeling like i was taking zen from her was really awkward and unpleasant because it does seem like she has repressed feelings for him. fuck and the whole story with echo girl was super predictable and generic and feels like something i’ve seen 100 times before and probably have. my overall feeling about this route can be summed up by this emoji.

i feel like it could have been improved by either removing the echo girl stuff or at least putting an interesting spin on it. i think they should have made zens’ childhood abuse and family problems and maybe his past as a gang member as well an actual conflict instead of it just being a thing of happenstance. it’s an interesting backstory that as far as i can recall didnt end up having an impact on the current day situation. it would have been interesting if he had some sort of emotional issue you had to help him through like jumin, like secret crippling insecurities due to his family telling him for years that he’s ugly and inadequate, and thats why he tries so hard to be perfect so that people will give him the love his parents didnt. also his elementary school teacher was implied to be a pedophile(??? i dont remember what was actually said in the conversation i just remember the pedo-vibes) so they could have made him a CSA survivor but maybe thats too dark even for mysme lol.

also his bad ending 1 confuses me. the first time i saw it it felt really rapey but rewatching it now, MC does seem to consent but its after being cold and refuting his advances so it seems really weird. MC seemed genuinely disinterested, but i guess she was just playing games, testing him to see what he’d do? since theyre in a relationship a year later. and his bad ending 3 (the one where youre both kidnapped by saeran) is pretty bizarre lol.

so yeah this is the weakest route imo. maybe its different for people who are zen fangirls but i personally felt like i was being super fake the whole route, which was especially jarring coming off of yoosung’s route where the dialogue choices felt very organic to me. also his responses to mean things arent even interesting lol so thats frustrating too. and this route felt weirdly short. all the others felt like 11 days but this one felt more like 5? and when i missed chats on this route i just let it go most of the time instead of spending hourglasses. i wasnt feeling it, mr krabs. by far the best part of his route for me was the relationship development between zen and jumin.

now that ive spent 4 paragraphs just complaining you probably think that i dont like zen but actually i think he’s is a fantastic supporting character and i do like him a lot. that picture of him sneezing was my phone wallpaper for quite a while lol.

Jumin

me at the beginning: i fucking hate jumin han. fuck him. fuck his cat. i hate this type of asshole love interest.

me after zens route: i guess he has some hidden depths... i’m curious...

me after jumins route: *loves jumin han so much i cant breathe*

this guy... this cat man...... where to start? i’ve had a while to think about this route and i’m still not totally sure how i feel. “i feel complicated” is a term i’m going to start using because its just too handy for situations like this.

i guess i dont like that to get the good end you had to be passive and compliant and act like you were walking on eggshells. your relationship with him is undeniably a little scary and abusive. i think jumin needs more in his life than just you. but mysme is an otome game so of course youre the one that “fixes” him but thinking about it more realistically its worrying and jumin should be in therapy cuz the dude undeniably has some issues.

winning his heart by being understanding and with gradual, slow-growing trust was pretty touching. something i really appreciate was him opening up and his true self actually being hard to accept sometimes, instead of whats expected which is “oh youre secretly a perfect, beautiful soul”.

i do really wish they would have opened him up further though. there isnt ever a point where he completely loses control of his emotions. not to be gross but i’d do anything to see him crying, honestly.

i hope people are joking when they say that his bad end (you know the one i mean) is a good end. just because its hot doesnt mean that its good lol. its actually really tragic and shows the deterioration of his mental state and how he’s just accepted that he’s a fucked up/defective person.

“I was worried that the loneliness inside me would pile up and explode some day.” FUCK. dont do this to me jumin. ;_; this line is heart breaking.

something thats kind of interesting and worth noting maybe is that even though the other rfa members arent privy to the VNMs and you can give them little indication that he’s acting so worryingly theyre all still alarmed and concerned and thinks that jumin is going to hold you hostage/abuse you, which makes me wonder if youre meant to infer from that that theyve noticed red flags in his personality that he’s potentially kinda crazy.

and man, zen is always complaining about how jumin seems to have no emotions, but jumin finally opens up about his feelings and zen calls you laughing hysterically about how pathetic he is for being emotional. i was kinda hurt on jumin’s behalf during that call lol. he is so supportive to zen on zen’s route. just... shut the fuck up you albino freak. dont make me whip out yoosung’s “hyung, what’s wrong with you?” emoji. i wont hesitate, bitch.

there. you asked for it. feel those judging purple oblongs pierce your soul.

man, just reading the dialogue options that treat him like a psycho make me cringe. usually i’m tempted by mean dialogue options but not this time. i want to protect jumin han. ;_; i want to untangle his threads. i dont want him to feel like a mutant ever again. i want to love and accept him. i am now the president of the jumin han protection squad. jumin han did nothing wrong. shameless jumin apologist. that’s me. no but seriously he did a lot wrong and is pretty morally grey but thats one of the reasons that i love him. if you love jumin for pure reasons (that arent just “daddy~”) then youre automatically my friend and i love and appreciate you.

just to love on him for a minute: he is so damn funny, for real. he’s such a sass master, its great. him being terrible with technology is funny. his social awkwardness is funny. his shitty jokes are funny because theyre not funny. he should be the poster child for gap moe cuz goddamn. he’s such a ham. an absolute goofball dressed as a billionaire CEO, and i dont think he even knows it.

also every time elizabeth meows i fucking lol. its literally just a woman saying “meow”. every time jumin says “elizabeth is just a cat, she’s not human” i’m like “ARE YOU SURE?”

Yoosung

this is the first route i got and i assumed that i had already peaked at the beginning and no one was ever going to top yoosung for me, and that assumption was correct. i love this boy. do you hear me? i love him. “perfect” has seven letters in it. “yoosung” has seven letters in it. coincidence? i dont think so. i have feeeeeeelings over this character. he is so darling. i just adore him. i’ve opened the app many times just to look at his album. his voice is like a choir of angels. i have so many screenshots of conversations with him on my phone. he is so selfless and caring and adorable and kinky and pure and i want him to be real so i can marry him irl.

i’m not even sure how to give a critique on his route because i feel so emotionally close to the situation lol. i was very, very invested. ah. gosh. this boy. his good ending is absolutely beautiful. you know youre playing a weird otome game when the good ending has your boyfriend tortured and disfigured. he really earned his happy ending, not quite as much as seven but its up there.

i really love how for better or worse, this boy is like putty in your hands to be molded and what you say to him effects him so deeply in a way that doesnt quite get as extreme as with the other characters. obviously your words majorly influence the other characters but i feel never to the extent where theyre hanging on to every little thing youre saying like yoosung does. which makes sense because he’s young and impressionable and doesnt know what to do with himself and he says he wants to be controlled lol.

MAN, speaking of that, i love his bad ending 3 so much. it’s so twisted that he’s technically getting what he wants in a lot of ways. he’s a masochist that loves the idea of being kept as a pet and controlled, and he gets all that and more with saeran. that ending is so fucking hot, slkdfljsf. i might write a fic. i have a couple ideas.

oh shit, using that seven gif just reminded me. there’s a chat thats on the first few days of common route that ive always participated in before, but when you dont participate in it and yoosung has time to ramble, it gets really kinky. he says “i wonder what it would feel like to be locked up? just a bit.... curious lolol” which i think is what he says when youre in the chat too BUT THEN HE STARTS GETTING OFF ON THE IDEA OF SEVEN BEING LOCKED UP TOO. “Imagine the super smart Seven all flustered. and not knowing what to do.” AND I’M JUST LIKE BOIIII;;; HOW YOU GONNA JUST TALK ABOUT THAT IN FRONT OF ZEN AND JAEHEE LIKE ITS NOTHING? if he would take the obvious hints that seven hits on him he’d probably be willing to roleplay that scenario. 707 strikes me as a fetish friendly person lolol.

ummm... well, to get back back on track, ahem.... him confusing you with rika was creepy and interesting and they didnt take it far enough. even on the yandere bad ending he’s still fully aware that you arent rika. it seemed like it was building towards him having some kind of psychosis where if you feed into his desire for you to be rika he’ll really think youre rika but that doesnt happen so theres no real pay off, and he doesnt have time to do anything yandere-y to you before the bomb goes off so i found that ending to be pretty disappointing and unsatisfying. it felt like someone waving a delicious cake in front of my face but only giving me a crumb of it in the end, do you know what i mean? aaa. maybe i can find a fic that runs with the ideas set up here. when youre desperate, turn to fanfiction lol.

speaking of disappointments, i’m not over the last line of his good ending being “youre not rika, are you?” like... at this point we’re past this arent we omg stoppp. this line is a blight on my happiness. fuck rika and fuck whoever thought that was a good last line.

i noticed that yoosung is the only rfa member including v and rika that doesnt have childhood trauma. his trauma all happened recently. i think that lends to him being the most fragile and child-like character. the other rfa members are so strong because their pasts molded them that way, but yoosung has no such constitution and rika’s death is undoubtedly the worst thing thats ever happened to him.

something thats been on my mind concerning bad ending 3: does rika know that saeran is torturing yoosung? saeran must know that yoosung is his savior’s cousin because he’s hacked the chat and presumably has read messages where yoosung mentions being her cousin, correct? therefor wouldnt that make him hesitant to harm him? i think rika must have consented to yoosung being tortured then. maybe his ultimate fate at the end of bad end 3 is that he’ll be brainwashed and become part of mint eye.

man he’s such a bad judge of character lol. he hero worships rika, loves echo girl, thinks that jumin isnt potentially dangerous, and even you can fall into this category if you choose to play it that way. the one person he really dislikes is v, and v has nothing but the rfa’s best interests at heart lol.

something i love about him is how quick he is to call everyone out on their shit. like, his finger is always on the “whats wrong with you? :>” emoji, just waiting for someone to say something he doesnt approve of lolol. he’s so empathetic and naive but he still has such a strong sense of right and wrong and isnt afraid of standing up to his older friends and i think thats great.

ahh. this boy. he might be ranked #2 on LOLOL but he’s ranked #1 in my heart.

707

before playing his route i thought seven was an obnoxious tryhard and that jumin was way funnier, and after playing his route i still think that he’s an obnoxious tryhard and that jumin is way funnier.

HOWEVER.

however. i can definitely see why he’s the most popular character. that hot and cold drama, i-cant-be-with-you-because-it’d-put-you-in-danger, dark childhood backstory, sad clown type shit is a recipe for a lot of fans to be in love with you. he personally doesnt make my kokoro go doki doki like i kind of expected because of the fan response but i do really like him as a character.

he’s similar to zen in the beginning in that you have to constantly stroke his ego and i was like uuuuggghhghghghghg nooooo. “god seven” kill me lol. at least that only lasts for the first few days though.

i liked his bad end 2 where youre really sexually forward with him and he keeps snubbing you until you just snap and push him down lol. (“why arent you pushing me away?” “...i dont know. the floor is comfy.”) seeing him finally just give in and be hedonistic and decide to run away with you was nice. god i want fanfics based on like every bad end, theyre just so interesting

the chat where he tells yoosung that their friendship doesnt matter was paaaainful. also that part on day 10 when youre leaving mint eye and he says horrible shit to v. what was it, “if this is what youre really like i can see why rika blinded you”? like... goddamn, dude. i would never want seven mad at me lol.

one of the moments on this route that got me the most was in the flashback when saeran is being brainwashed and is speaking of or thinking about seven and says something like “please come back. we dont even have to be happy. just as long as we’re together i can endure anything” and then he’s crying about how he misses him and.... augh... *clutches at chest like the heart attack guy meme* i want to give saeran 52 hugs and a box of cupcakes and a puppy. i want to adopt him even though he’s older than me and be his mom. saeran.... saeran...... ;_;

THE ZEN AND YOOSUNG DRUNK PHONE CALL AT THE END OF DAY 10 IS THE BEST FUCKING PHONE CALL IN THE GAME. i called yoosung again after they hang up and he answers and its so great too. i need fanfiction R I G H T N O W about that night. nsfw or sfw, i just need more drunk yoosung antics and zen trying to handle him. oh and if you also call seven at this time he picks up and its really sweet and i think it should have been an incoming call so more people would hear it. the fact that the first time he tells you he loves you is in an optional phone call kinda sucks.

oh fuck his fucking after ending. at first where mc and saeyoung are in bed and talking about going to rescue saeran i was like “GDI CHERTIZ” thinking they were going to leave it open ended, and then in the chat where saeran joins in i fucking s c re a med i was so happy and relieved omfg. seeing the rfa being so inclusive and nice to him warmed my fucking heart. and when they asked him if he has the same taste as saeyoung and he says “ive never been interested in women” and zen is like “oh? where is jumin lololol” i fucking died. i can see now why ive been seeing yoosung/saeran shipping stuff and its romantic and not the abusive stuff based off of yoosung’s bad end 3 like i was expecting. but of course it turns out to be a fucking dream and ruins everything. the second that creepy music box music started playing i was like “fuck you cheritz”.

707′s voice actor in the free talk part is great. saying all these cheesy romantic lines makes him want to “rub sandpaper all over my skin” lmao. and he hopes that it becomes a series with new titles like “Strange Messenger and Thankful Messenger”? fuck yes mate, fuck yes.

does seven not actually open a toy store? :c i kind of want this to be an actual thing. its a good fit for him. maybe the fact that he dreamt about it means that it’s something he’d been thinking about.

oh and BI THE WAY, SEVEN IS BISEXUAL. this makes me so happy. bi visibility is so important to me and the fact that he’s the face of the game, the fan favorite, the canon route, etc, is so delicious. thank you cheritz.

on the subject of the secret endings.... man. i knew it was going to be crazy but i still wasnt prepared. these were a trip and a half and genuinely had me feeling shook up emotionally. if there’s ever a time in my life when i’m too happy i’ll just think about v. definitely the most tragic character in the story. he’s not an angel and he’s pretty much culpable for his own suffering but he did not deserve that.

something of note is that jumin was in love with rika but after learning what she did to v, he has such a grudge against her that he wants her arrested even when she’s completely lost her mind and he even thinks about chasing her down to alaska. he loves v so, so much, augh. it hurts. i’m in pain.

it’s pretty fucked up that jumin (and yoosung and zen and the rest of the world) are still being lied to about v’s “suicide”. jumin spent a lot of money and went to a lot of trouble to get help for saeran, who is his best friend’s murderer and he just doesnt know it.

the fact that yoosung in particular never knows the truth about the cult and drugs and brainwashing and everything is a good thing though. just seeing his hero come back from the dead and be reduced to someone so mentally ill that she cant communicate and needs 24/7 care would be extremely distressing and i imagine would worsen his depression. knowing the truth would be too much i think.

i think this game fucked up v and rika’s VA’s too because both of their free talks quickly derail into too-serious territory. v is like “i once hurt my wife so badly and the guilt was unbearable” and rika is like “im going to die some day and i have no idea when...” and im sitting there like “i need a fucking hug, oh my god”

it’s amazing how quickly the secret endings shot saeran up to being one of my favorite characters. he’s so good. ;_;

okay but what was mint eye’s plan? i know they wanted to end the world’s suffering but like, how exactly? through brainwashing + drugs? rika could clearly see that saeran was miserable though, couldnt she? also some of the things saeran said made me feel like they were going to do some sort of ritual group suicide or something. maybe thats how everyone is going to be happy. and the doctor says that saeran was on peyote, shrooms, AND meth? god damn, what a cocktail lmao rika doesnt fuck around.

i love rika. she’s thoroughly disturbing and a sickening person and i can see why she’s so hated now in the fandom but even she is deserving of sympathy (abused adopted child with severe mental illness) and also has good qualities (high emotional and social intelligence, genuinely sweet, and extremely empathetic). one of my favorite villains from anything in recent memory. she’s terrifying and i absolutely love her.

we never learn her real name, which i thought was intriguing. i get the feeling that she’s meant to be mysterious and unknowable, even with all her power stripped from her as it is at the end.

im so happy that the game ended on a hopeful note, with saeran seeming like he's starting to recover and he's either grown out his hair or dyed it back. he still has literal mint eyes though, which makes me wonder if theyre not contacts like i was thinking and are actually some permanent body mod he had done. he got a tattoo of the mint eye logo, so i wouldnt be surprised if that was the case.

stray thoughts (this part is super disjointed and im just saying things as i think of them)

with the exception of 707 (if you count the secret endings as being part of his route), sometimes i get the feeling of these characters being like big fish in a small pond. mysme is already head and shoulders above what i thought a mobile game could ever be, but that doesnt change that i still feel hungry for something more. i want to see this cast in more situations, under different circumstances. they all feel like fleshed out characters full of potential that are just waiting for something more and bigger to do, like maybe something thats not restricted by being a mobile otome game. but maybe thats one for the fic writers, i dont know. maybe cheritz could work them into another project somehow since mysme got so popular.

i love that the characters have actual flaws. all of them have unattractive qualities that really make them seem human. and all of their relationships with each other are entertaining too. they are all multi-faceted and interesting and i really do adore this cast.

so 707 is the canon route but i hate the thought of any of them being canon because that means the others arent canon. all of them needed you. i want a harem route. give me all of them at the same time.

i feel a spiritual connection with vanderwood. he just constantly looks so done. his gender confused the hell out of me at first. i thought maybe he was a trans woman at first because of the hair and name but then he responds to seven referring to him as a woman with things like “i’m going to taze you”, so i was like “okay, he’s just a dude with a girls name and haircut for some reason” but then seven tripped me up again with the fact that even when the scene is really serious and seven isnt in a joking around mood, he still refers to him with female pronouns. but i guess this could be explained as this is just what seven’s used to. @aouba brought up a really good headcanon that i believe actually is canon because it makes too much sense which is that “mary vanderwood” is just the identity that he’s assuming at the moment, like saeyoung being “707″. its even noted by one of the other RFA members (yoosung?) that the name is weird and sounds fake.

i’m never more thankful to be a pale girl with long brown hair and bangs than when i’m playing this game lol

also i love this game because it feeds into my pathological need to help people without me actually having to do anything lolol

is it just me or do the full portraits of the characters look weird? like when you look at them on the wiki and you can see their legs. i cant tell if it looks bizarre because you just never see their legs in the game or if their legs are drawn weird or both lol.

i love the character designs. 707 in particular is very nicely put together and distinctive. and i love how angelic rika looks. that one taylor swift song thats like “darling i’m a nightmare dressed like a daydream” is totally her theme song.

... okay now that im listening to that song it really does fit rika a lot.

oh and Take Me To Church is def v’s song for rika.

the two guests i was unable to get throughout all the routes is @god and @star. star’s is just so counter-intuitive and god’s seemed like such a crapshoot that with two chances for both i made the same mistake on their first email both times lol.

it surprises me that religion is mentioned so frequently and openly. maybe its not as big of a deal in korea or something? i’m thinking thats the case since two of the VAs mention their religion in their free talk (i forget who but one said they were an atheist and another said they were christian). it just seems like an oddly serious and potentially alienating topic to bring up in a dating sim. also jumin and yoosung are so inconsistent with what they believe. jumin says that he’s christian on one route and then firmly says that there’s no god on another. yoosung says he doesnt believe in god multiple times and that he has no interest in having any religion but he also talks about praying and refers to rika as being “up there” and watching over the rfa. i think zen is actually the only character that doesnt ever say where he aligns.

was anyone else suspecting that rika was the one that blinded the dog, sally? i’m glad that turned out to not be the case.

i love the voice acting so much. i think quality of voice acting is sometimes harder to discern when its not a language you speak, but the quality of the voice acting here shines even to my english-only ears. yoosung’s voice is straight up one of my favorite sounds, 707 has an impressive range and is overall just always entertaining to listen to, i love the way zen’s VA delivers his lines when zen is surprised and his howls lol (which were apparently ad-libbed by his VA), jaehee’s voice sounds so sweet and lovely, and jumin is so very... jumin-y and nice and relaxing to listen to.

zen and the twins were so fucking cute in the flashbacks i want to scream. i know we get to see yoosung as a teenager but im not satisfied and i want to see jumin and jaehee as little children so bad too, augh.

rika and yoosung are the only two characters that get the creepy ass yandere eyes where their eyes get all dull and flat when theyre being crazy.

i never cried but i got pretty close on yoosung’s good end and during the secret endings. i still feel shook from the secret endings lol.

why are there still bad end relationship endings for 707 and zen and jumin that no one has found? its almost february of 2017. its surprising considering the games popularity and how long its been out. is datamining not a thing with mobile games? or does the fandom not have anyone who knows how to datamine, or what?

ships im particularly interested in: jumin/v, jumin/zen, jumin/yoosung, yoosung/seven, yoosung/jaehee, yoosung/zen, yoosung/saeran, seven/saeran because i have no shame, mc/everyone, like literally just every ship tbh because i love every character hnnng

i had no idea that buying the christmas DLC gets you another free talk with the VAs. yoosung’s VA is so cute. “please get your flu shots if you havent already”.

not sure what to do now. i definitely want to replay yoosung. and i want to hunt for all the CGs and phone calls too, but i dont want to spend $20 on the calling cards lol. would buying them even be a better deal than just spending the same money on hourglasses? $26 gets you 1000 hourglasses which is more than you’d ever need, right? it seems like the better deal, unless youre not using a phone call guide for some reason and want to try to just discover them all on your own.

i’m super excited for more DLC. i definitely think there will be more because when you open the DLC folder, the christmas DLC is shoved off to the left, making room for at least one more. also just the nature of it being a DLC folder and not a direct button to the christmas DLC.

... i guess thats all i have to say lol;;; bless cheritz. this game is fantastic and has consumed my life and ruined my sleep for the past almost three months and i had so much fun and i hope they get even more ambitious with their future projects.

#vidoxi talksy #mystic messenger #mysme #mystic messenger spoilers #mysme spoilers

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vivianrhopper85 · 7 years ago

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Bad Neighbours and How to Deal with Them pt. 2

Your home is supposed to be your personal sanctuary; whether you live in a house, townhouse, apartment, or condo. While you can control what goes on inside the four walls of your personal space, a neighbour, good or bad, can make or break the quality of your living arrangement.

Two years ago we posted a piece brimming with helpful tips on how to deal with bad neighbours. Since that time we have been contacted by a number of people looking for advice since they are struggling to cope with bad neighbour problems that have spun out of control and made things unbearable. The advice offered in the first article provides excellent general preliminary steps on how to work your way through most problems through an open dialogue and conflict resolution. While all of these situations are best dealt with mature face-to-face conversations, there are particular scenarios when you feel like you need to take things to the next level.

In order to help those who are dealing with escalating neighbour problems, we’ve created a part two to the series that dives a little deeper into some common neighbour related issues, and offers practical solutions to implement in early stages of conflict and after the communication lines have faltered.

Before you do any Demolition make sure to ask your neighbours first

Renovation Resentments

Alexander Louie:

Hi. Help please. I have a bad neighbour that is very against me doing an addition and 2nd level top up. They even tried to apeal committee of adjustments approval but to no success. I’m about to get permits for construction but was informed i may have to breach into there property because we sit so close to property line. Looked up permit to breach but that is for old construction for safety & health. Is there anything i can do so even if neighbor complains i could just shove it in there face. I normally wouldn’t smug it but this one would be called for. Everyone in the neighborhood is cheering for me and seems like this might be a racial thing.

Major renovations are an inconvenience for everyone involved: they’re messy, costly, and loud. When undergoing a large project (demolition, extension or addition) that is going to create a significant increase in traffic, noise pollution, and some days that the exterior of your home isn’t going to look pristine. It’s best to warn your neighbours ahead of time.

Once you have ‘green lit’ your project plans, visit all of your surrounding neighbours (and the ones directly across the street). Provide them with all of the details you can surrounding the final result of the project, time-frame, as well as your contact information and your contractors for the time during the renovation (this is particularly important if you’ll be moving out temporarily).

Show your neighbours places where the view from their home will be particularly different after the renovation to help prepare them for the change. It’s also a good idea to show them these plans before seeking permit approval since this shows them that their input is valued (also make sure that you respectfully listen to their input towards project while realizing it’s your house and your money).

As long as everything you are moving towards is legal and reasonable, most neighbours are going to be good with it. If you see a new perspective, like how your new balcony overlooks their pool, odds are you can find a way to give everyone the privacy they deserve. If not, try to reach a mutually agreeable resolution. It never hurts to show up with some fresh baked cookies or another "peace" offering to help display that you’re a good neighbour who cares.

Keep in mind that your project will be annoying, and will be an inconvenience to your neighbours. If you’re not living in the house during the renovation to monitor closely, you need to be particularly sensitive. When the project is underway it’s a good idea to check in with your neighbours. Approach them honestly about any delays and respond swiftly to any complaints they have.

Make sure the work team cleans up at the end of each day to avoid debris ending up in your neighbour’s yard. If their cars get covered in dry wall dust, pay to have them washed. Make sure that the work crew is abiding by the standard construction time guidelines for your neighbourhood. Small gestures can go a long way towards keeping the peace! After the renovation is over, don’t forget to invite your neighbours over for some tea or cocktails so they can see the final result.

The alternative to playing nice is your neighbours complaining, a stop work order being issued, and your contractor potentially being warned and/or fined. If one neighbour does complain, odds are the solid relationship you’ve worked on building with your other neighbours could help keep your project running in the agreed upon timeline.

As long as you don't have neighbours like Rosemary, you can solve everything

Bullying In The Backyard

cheri:

I live next to a neighbour from hell, they have lived next to us for 8 years . We have had property damage on our house, crotch grabbing, damage to vehicles they would smash their car into ours. Yelling calling police stating we assaulted them even when we were not there. Making things up to police. Police don’t take us seriously that its just a neighbour dispute. They ask us why and we don’t know. We cant talk to you the police anymore. I have fear for my children and husband that they will somehow harm them. The list is very long for what they do. Today the police came and started accusing my husband of following one of them. We have a son with leukemia and I have thyroid cancer we don’t need the extra stress and who has the time. We need help but from who we don’t know. We would love to move but financially we cant. They wont leave us alone.

Terry:

My niece has a neighbour who is making her life hell. This neighbour (thought to have alcohol/chemical dependency) has called Children’s Aid saying that the children are not fed properly and are not dress appropriately. Children’s Aid visited my niece and found the complaint unfounded. A few days later this same neighbour called SPCA complainting that the dog for foaming at the mouth and vicious. The visit from SPCA was again unfounded. My niece has been accussed to egging her house, which she did not do. In fact her house was egged as well. I should mention that this is a townhouse. This neighbour also complaints constantly to the landlord about my niece as well as other tenants. My niece approached this neighbour to find out why she is doing this and her comment was that "I will do whatever to get you to move". My niece has don’t nothing to this neighbour to be treated like this. The landlord (who I might add is a slum lord, but that is a different subject) contacts my niece everytime this neighbour complains even though there is no basis for her complaints. What can be done? She does not have the ability to move.

Bullying, unfortunately doesn’t stop in the school yards. There are a number of grown-up bullies, and even worse they could be your neighbours. In 2013, a legal case between Ralph Scala and father Felice, known as the "Junction Bully", justice was served to 28 neighbours who had been terrorized by this unneighbourly creep. Former neighbours suffered through over ten years of stress and fear at the hands of Scala who damaged cars, threatened them, threw rocks at windows, and flooded lawns. The ruling of the case led to order controls including the Junction Bully staying outside of the area from St. Clair to Lakeshore and Jane Street to Landsdowne, in addition to remaining at least 500 metres away from the neighbours he once intimidated on a daily basis.

Thankfully, most neighbour concerns don’t reach this level of scope and trauma, however there are certain steps you can take if you are being bullied by your neighbour. First off, if you aren’t fearing for your safety, try to talk it out calmly and civilly like adults. If that is not possible or you do and nothing changes, make sure you keep careful documentation of the problem. If you’re renting, contact your building management company or landlord to see what they can do to help with the issue at hand. Because you are providing specific evidence they will be better able to address it.

Mortgage Broker and Landlord Simmer Principio says,

I want to keep my tenants happy because it’s in everyone’s best interest. Happy renters stay in the property longer and may even provide referrals to other friends looking for a place to live. If I have a neighbour or a tenant driving others away, it’s not just a community problem, it’s a business problem that is impacting my bottom line. Building management can’t ignore complaints of bullying or harassment, period.

Another option is to contact your city or building for mediation to help mitigate the problem and find a reasonable solution for everyone. If that fails, you could always go the legal route, which can be costly, time consuming, and damage the relationship beyond repair. Sometimes it’s just not worth it, particularly if it is impacting your health and quality of life, and you’re better off considering a move.

Make sure your story doesn't end like the one in The 'Burbs

Yard Maintenance & Garbage

Joy:

Hi Jamie, I live in a townhouse and between my unit and the next unit there is a grass area about 5×12. The new neighbour a tenant moved in Oct 2016. They are using this area as a dumping ground. (plastic bag, pots, plastic bottle, paper, old furniture, you name it.....). I can’t speak with them as I get furious each time I come out of the house so nothing good will come out of me so wrote them a letter, within minutes they cleaned up. spoke with the owner nothing has been done. They have so much out now the garbage pilled up to about a 2ft. With the snow covering it, I have not idea the city will pick it up. I am a single woman living alone and kind of worried if I take action they might retaliate but I have not choice. Would you know who to contact on this matter? I have pictures to show too. Please and thank you in advance

Ash:

Hi I’v been living in my house for the past 16 years none of my neighbors on either side maintain their properties I cut their lawn dig their weeds and water their grass, things were going ok until last year we had a downspout put in between our houses everything is to code but apparently the water spout which is no where close to their property is apparently jumping on to their driveway and causing it to crack. It was raining and we caught her damaging our spout kicking it we had to call the police we had no evidence but they spoke to her to which she replied she was kicking the stones close to the spout! The police basically sed they cant do anything to contact the city anyways then they called the city who then told us to put an extension to the spout so it goes directly on to the grass which we did the city guy came checked everything is in order we was hoping chapter closed but no now that snow has fallen she has dug like a well in the middle of both our lawns she knows how I like the property maintained and does things to provoke me I feel Im living in my home in my own own property with no peace shes always trying to do things to provoke us what can we do pls help its driving us crazy

It’s best to tread lightly when it comes to dealing with your neighbours, particularly when it comes to how they maintain their yards. Often people are unaware that a problem even exists, and many are happy to resolve it. Some people prefer to remain anonymous and send a typed letter via the post to complain about an unkempt lawn or pile of garbage that needs to be cleaned up. This also potentially protects your anonymous identity should you need to go to the city about the problem. If the neighbours are renters, consider contacting the home owner directly, since it is their responsibility to ensure their property is properly maintained.

Before you complain, in person or via anonymous note, do your homework. Research your area’s zoning laws and protocol so you know if you are within your rights to complain.

If all of this fails to work, keep detailed notes on the events that have happened, including dates and times, take pictures and/or video of your evidence, and take note of other neighbours who have also voiced similar concerns. If you wish to file a complaint about neighbour’s grass and weeds exceeding the height of 8 inches or 20cms, you can call 311 to voice your complaints, and the city will send your neighbour a notice providing the offenders with two weeks to maintain their lawn, or they will provide the maintenance and add it onto their property tax bill.

For neighbours who have lawns littered with garbage, you can contact 311 to complain using Chapter 629, Property Standards 9, 10B and 22A which , "requires all yards and any other part of a private property be kept free from garbage, pests or conditions that may attract pests or constitute a health, fire or other hazard. Garbage that is kept on private property has to be stored in containers."

For your litter bug neighbour chapter 548, Littering and Dumping, Section 548-3, "makes it an offence for anyone to dump garbage including organic waste (including fresh, frozen, dried, cooked, prepared foods and leftovers) on any piece of land in Toronto."

This is the reason you don't want Harry Potter as your neighbour Source: Hollywood.com

Pet Problems

Anas:

Hi I live in vaughn. My neighbor has a big and very loud dog. They put there dog in backyard as early as 6:30 am when its still dark outside. The dog barks and keep barking. We can’t sleep at all. My doctor put me on antidepressants because of it. I filed complaint with video evidence with city. The inspector from animal service phoned me after few days that we left notice at their home to call us. The barking is still going on. Can’t sleep. Trying to contact city but no response from them. Guide me what actions can i take Thanks

Alexandra G.:

Hi there, I have some neighbors that just recently bought a puppy, and when it comes issue of where they allow their dog to relieve themselves, they deliberately pick up the puppy from where it wanted to do its needs(which is beside their property, on their lawn), and move it/train it to poop on our lawn! I’ve even looked out and opened the window, and they saw me seeing them poop their puppy on our lawn, but they just ignored me (they usually do this at night when they think no one can see them, but also in full daylight). I live in a single, detached home so there shouldn’t be any reason for them to push their dog on our lawn (as their lawn is as equally in size as ours). I love dogs, and it’s not the puppy’s fault for their disrespectful behavior. Please help, as this is quite stressful!

Pets can enrich our lives, but our neighbours don’t always feel the same way. It is a pet owner’s responsibility to make sure that your pet does not disturb your neighbours. Toronto has anti-noise bylaws to help people file complaints surrounding repeated barking, whining or noise-making of any animal in a residential area under Municipal Code Chapter 591. Fees for these offences on the first conviction can clock in at a maximum of $5,000. Most noise complaints received in the city are related to dogs. If an approach to your neighbour about their noisy pet doesn’t improve the issue, call Toronto Animal Services at 416-338-PAWS or send them an email at [email protected] and report it. If the problem continues, legal action can be taken against the pet owner, and Animal Services can educate you as the complainant about next steps.

Neighbour letting their dog defecate on your lawn? A lot of people don’t realize that even if they clean up after their dog it can damage private property. If talking isn’t working you can contact the city at 311. Tickets are generally around $250 for owners who fail to take proper action to remove excrement left by a dog.

Bit by a neighbour’s dog? If you are not satisfied with your neighbour’s response to this bite, after getting any medical attention you need you can report the dog who bit you to Toronto Animal Services, seven days a week between 830AM to 730PM.

Arnold Schwarzenegger in Comando would not be a good neighbour

Wildlife Woes

Katerelou:

What do you do with three annoying neighbors? I have one next to me who is renting and they do not care for their lawn. They have BBQs and throw their bones in the backyard causing rats to run in and out of our backyards. We had ask them to split the cost on our fence that separates our backyards due to the fact that it’s not stable and they refuse. We do not have any information on the people who own the house. Then I have on the other side a lady who calls to give anyone and everyone tickets on cars that park on the side of the curb after three hours. She also gets another lady who live a house down to measure people’s driveways when people are home. I find these people ridiculous. Also the lady that calls to ticket people has dogs. Her dog bit mine through the fence. I filed a complaint and she said we will not get a cent out of her cause she knew people in the city of Mississauga. To this day I have not received any information or email back on the case with my dog and it has been three years. Any ideas to deal with the trio that torments our neighborhood?

John:

I have rodent issues, that have multiple entry points into my house! I had pest control over and they stated my two major issues are 1) my neighbour feeding the rodents.. peanuts and birdseed.. and the 2) neighbours tree that is over my house.. when I confronted my neighbour she appeared to listen! But 5days after this day of discovery, she is still feeding the rodents! As stated, I have multiple rodent entry points on the house... all within 15 feet of where this Lady is feeding the rodents... they have also damaged the interior drywall in one room... I had a tree company come out and look at the tree, but wanted her commitment to cutting it, or they wouldn’t get involved with it.. they too stated, the rodent food is the number one issue, I’m facing.... The only route I feel that will work with this knucklehead, is small claims court! (Aside from an independent professional) Any advice would be appreciated...

If your neighbour doesn’t understand the consequences of feeding wildlife, even when you try explaining it to them, you should be aware that they are breaking city bylaws in Toronto and Hamilton. Animals who are fed by humans can become dependent upon artificial food sources, and will lose their natural fear of humans and domesticated pets, which becomes a riskier situation for everyone involved. This can also lead to unwanted animals who become aggressive when they don’t get the food they’ve become accustomed to receiving. Complaints can be made to the city by contacting 311, where the city will take the time to educate and warn residents. If the feeding does not stop Municipal Licensing and Standards an investigation and charges can be laid under City of Toronto Municipal Code such as Chapter 608, Parks, Section 608 - 36.

Not every parking dispute ends like in Bad Neighbours 2

Parking Problems

Karin:

My friends neighbours have a camera pointed directly on his property ( his driveway and door entrance) it is is not pointed on their property at all . this neighbour is situated on the left of his detached home.they watch when he and his guests come and go and call the by law should any perceived infraction occour such as parking for more than three hours on the street most of which are proven to be false. these calls and complaints happen sometimes more than three or four times a day! . As i friend i have driven in and caught the neighbour peeping around looking in and around his property because , i assume, his car was not there, so they asssumed he was not home and did not recognise my car. They have also uttered discrimitory slurs towards him because he is gay. My friend is renting this house....moving is not an option , what can he do?

Some areas are really competitive when it comes to readily available parking spaces, which means that at any point and time you could be vying for that perfect spot with the person who lives next to you. Sometimes this can lead to heated parking disputes, whether it’s guests parking for too long, or parking too close to a neighbour’s driveway.

Even if you aren’t technically blocking a driveway, you can also be fined for parking within 60 centimeters of a laneway or driveway if someone is going by the precise letter of the law. It’s often best to let these situations slide, particularly if you and your guests are parking for longer than the regulated time. As annoying as this can be, when a neighbour calls the parking authority, they are within their right to do so. Try to problem solve around this.

Have a neighbour with a driveway? Consider asking them if you or a guest can park in their driveway during your next soiree to avoid your guests getting ticketed. Don’t forget to thank your neighbours who lend their driveways with some flowers or chocolates.

Wes Bentley in American Beauty was the worst neighbour

Not Respecting Boundaries

Jim:

My neighbour is a retired city employee. He was, at best, surly when he approached us to tell us what he thought about something in the past. I had to tell him not to bother us anymore; then police had to get involved... a few years ago he widened his driveway – more than a foot onto our property; something I pointed out but was not given the time of day. I was forced to build a fence without resolving the driveway issue due to his constant incursions into our yard and garage – we would’ve built the fence anyway for the sake of our kids and dogs. I cannot find a suitable location to run the water away from my house and when I dig trenches along the other side of my fence, he fills them in (the fence is not built up to the property line; he parked a truck on the encroached driveway portion that hasn’t moved since – and can’t. City won’t remove it as derelict because they’re buddy-buddy). All I want is the encroached driveway removed so I plant some small hedge-type trees to offset the fence being farther off the line. But I couldn’t talk to him about it – he hit me when I tried (police said that was ok since I was at his door). I’m worried about legal costs – or at least my wife is. I’m worried we have waited to long. We have a survey and performed a boundary mark up before we built the fence – the survey is on record with the city. Why do we need to pay money to have him removed from our property? How can we deal with this?

Sometimes neighbours won’t respect property boundaries. After you’ve tried looking at your respective deeds to see where the property lines are, if no resolution is reached you’ll need to pay for a survey of the land. Depending on your relationship with the neighbour you can split the cost. If tensions are high, it’s likely worthwhile to pay for it yourself.

Once you know what the boundaries are, you can notify them and they should make the required changes/ move their things. If this does not work you can contact the City of Toronto and submit a fence dispute application where the fence viewers will help you decide on an appropriate and logical space to place a divisional fence, and even make a call on who pays for what.

After you know exactly where your boundaries are, they should move their belongings. If not, try going to mediation. Many homeowners associations offer mediation services. If yours does not, you can hire a private mediator to help you work through the encroachment issues. Otherwise, you will have to go to court and have a judge order the guy next door - to keep his things next door.

You don't want this Beetlejuice situation repeating at your dinner party

What If You’ve Had Complaints Called on You?

Maha:

Hi I have been living in this furnished appartment an upper unit for a few months now with my husband and three children aged below 6 years. My neighbor below is retired. He has been complaining to the management about noise. I did all i can to reduce the children noise to the minimum. But it seems he has taken it so far and i think he has depression so he is over reacting. He fires a horn every time someone steps a foot on the floor. But tonight i heard him shout after i dropped the mobile on the floor. I am terrified. I dont know if he has gone mad and my harm us. I also can not move now. Im helpless

If your neighbour is complaining about you, take heart and think about it from their perspective before you react. If you’re in a building with thin walls and ceilings, take off your shoes when you get home and try to walk with a lighter step, and put down a carpet. If it seems unwarranted, connect with your building management to see if there is something they can do. Pick up after your pets, and be kind before you start a war with your neighbour. For tips on building a better relationship with your neighbours from day one, consider reading some advice here or here.

from News And Tip About Real Estate https://jamiesarner.com/toronto-real-estate/2017/06/dealing-with-neighbours-2/

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