#bec speculation

[secondarythings]

Bomb Rush Cyberfunk

I'm replaying BRC and just go to the point in the mall where the Oldhead unlocks the area behind his speakers. Although I don't recall the exact wording, he says that he doesn't like that Felix and then Cyber were wearing the mask and that some things should be left alone.

My theory?

At some point, Felix entered Old Amsterdam and found the sarcophagus with the mask.

And then took it and put it on his face.

The upper two pics are canonical, the third one is a character model in the game's files called Kid Felix. I'm guessing he was pretty young when he discovered Old Amsterdam.

An Oldhead even remarks that New Amsterdam doesn't look much like Amsterdam. But who remembers it? Felix in his first dream sequence.

Canal, typical buildings, pretty Amsterdam-y.

There's even a tree in Old Amsterdam.

That's where Felix got his mask from.

And maybe something else?

The jetboost just looks freaky to me.

To sum up: little Felix (probably) fell and found himself in Old Amsterdam, upon which he desecrated a coffin and then wore the spoils of the crime on his face.

It's probably cursed and now DJ is cursed too.*

*that part is purely speculative. Although...

Felix wore it in the place of a jet boost and was famous for not needing one. Huh... (okay, this one really is just speculation)

[brainbleedo]

I hear your sam-celia-alice polycule but I raise you;

Celia doesn't actually like Sam and is using him as a means to an end but she's actually developing feelings for Alice who likes her back but doesn't want to hurt Sam so is standing back to let him be happy and to get over her feelings for Celia (perhaps developing some for Gwen instead???)

Then when it all finally comes out than Celia doesnt and never did like Sam but did develop feelings for Alice shit falls apart because Sam hates Celia for what she did but he also can't help but hate Alice because Celia fell for her, Alice feels like it's her fault and she hates Celia for what she did to Sam (but also still kind of likes her which is agony) and Celia is falling apart because she ruined the one good thing she had going.

Just a thought

[sunshineandlyrics]

Good for Rebecca for standing up for herself!!!

[ofliterarynature]

Last month’s book club was a repeat - so good we had to read it twice! This is one of the smartest, most intricate, and confusing but currently relevant books I’ve ever read. I’ll have to get my cork board and string ready for the third read.

[petit-papillion]

Peter Windsor on YouTube as quoted by Planet F1.

Funnily he seems to be making a case the whole time that George would (initially) be better than Charles (if they were both at Mercedes), but then there's this quote at the end. Basically saying Charles is almost as good as the 8 7-time world champion.

[blackbonnet]

is con o neill openly gay bec craig mazin implied in the tlou podcast that he is (a gay actor)

[hartz-penny]

I’m watching The Big Bang Theory (I stand by my choices, this show was honestly really funny up to season 9, also Leonard and Penny were one of my fave ships) and it’s the episode where Penny tells Leonard she loves him for the first time.

It’s in the middle of an argument and Penny has to go to work so they table talking about it for the moment but they’re both very affected by it and honestly I would love this for Chenford.

They’re on a scene - alone bc these two do still have some semblance of professional boundaries despite all of the touching and sex planning outside the division - and they’re arguing and Lucy blurts out that she loves him but then they have to go and do their job so they can’t talk about it in that exact moment.

BONUS if one of them gets hurt / almost hurt. And then end of episode we get a beautiful scene where they get to properly say it to each other and bask in it.

[thewertsearch]

AA: there was another half by scourge in two parts AA: one part three symbols AA: and the other AA: five AA: why the scale was tipped in this way between sisters AA: i cannot say!

Well, Bec's code was originally implanted in a Seer, so maybe Terezi’s brain is just better-suited for carrying gene sequences. It is one of the most obviously cerebral classes.

Four codes, each born from a separate Vriska Incident.

This is why Scratch was egging Vriska on so much. He was contributing to his own creation.

AA: each fragment would be transcribed in our rulebooks AA: sealing the collaboration between rust bloods and blue bloods AA: completing the code for our sessions architect

I still can't tell if each code is a fragment of MEOW, or if MEOW is only one of the four sequences that created Scratch. I certainly hope it's the former, because if Scratch's MEOW has been tampered with, his abilities might differ from those of a normal First Guardian. We'll have no idea what he's truly capable of.

This isn't the first time I've been confused by Scratch's origins, either. There's a small discrepancy in the comic, concerning the nature of the cueball he was (presumably) spawned from. I haven't brought it up before, but since this scene appears to leading into Scratch's creation, it may be my last chance to speculate.

So - the cueball. The magical little orb that Scratch is a dead ringer for. Barring the surprise introduction of a second white sphere in this infodump, it's the only item in the comic which would create a cueball-headed First Guardian. Franky, if he's not made from the thing, it just raises further questions, and I think it's essentially confirmed.

And it makes sense, doesn't it? The cueball can answer any question, so it clearly has access to some wellspring of absolute knowledge. Clearly, it's the reason for Scratch's omniscience... right?

Well, no! That's the problem! The cueball's omniscience is completely redundant, because the MEOW code already contains an omniscience gene!

According to the Scratch loredump, any 'intelligent' host for the MEOW code will be granted near-omniscience. Scratch didn't need the cueball, provided his humanoid component was sufficiently clever. Considering Scratch's own analytical personality, this was obviously the case.

Like - you get what I'm saying, right? Scratch's omniscience has two completely independent origins. It's an extremely strange discrepancy, and I'm not sure what it could mean.

The best theory I currently have is that Scratch arranged this himself, to give himself an advantage. Maybe having two sources of omniscience makes him even more knowledgeable than his peers? It would be very Homestuck for some characters to be 'more omniscient' than others.

AA: there was another fragment […] AA: an additional eight symbols AA: from a wild card source i suppose AA: it came from a timeline not meant to happen

Wh- Gamzee interfered in the creation of Scratch?

...fuck.

This is why Scratch is so uniquely malevolent - because Gamzee injected some foreign DNA into his sequence, creating a mutant First Guardian, with motives transcending the planet he was ostensibly made for.

I suddenly understand jack shit - but there's one thing I am sure of, and that's who to blame. A powerful, neutral Sgrub NPC was corrupted into joining the cult of English, and he has to be the one pulling the strings here.

[cursedvida]

During my first watch with my mom. She pointed this out to me that made so much sense. When Noa and Mae were both climbing the cliff to get inside the vault, she told me “Oh thats why Mae followed him- bec his clan are climbers. She needed help to get up at that Vault and thats why she chose Noa.”

My mom speculates that Mae(while in hiding) mustve seen Noa and his gang climb up the nest during the first minutes of the movie and saw Noa get to the very top bravely. That made her interested. She follows Noa knowing his clan must be good climbers cause their entire culture has a ritual that revolves around getting eggs on top of birds nests (and also why they survived the vault flooding - “EAGLE CLAN CLIMB”)

Kudos to my mom for noticing. I never thought of that while watching! I just thought that they crossed paths randomly and after what happened to his clan they needed each other’s help. It could be a mix of both.

I want to know if others also thought of it too. What other interpretations for the scenes. Whats your take on why Mae followed Noa?

I hadn't thought of that! The truth is, my idea was that Mae followed him because he was heading toward the place where Proximus was located (they had a common goal) and at the same time he was a walking supply of food and resources, something she probably needed a lot since she was alone. But now that you mention it, it makes a lot of sense that, seeing him climb, she would think that in addition to being useful for getting food or having a common enemy, he could also be an essential element for her to access the vault. Your mom has a keen eye for these things, honestly, a huge round of applause because that detail makes it even more coherent that Mae would follow him and consider him a valuable asset for her.

In fact, I think I remember that when Noa decides to leave and leave her with the rest of the humans while Raka looks at him disapprovingly, she seems quite annoyed, which fits very well with the idea that she had in mind to use him to climb and access the vault and feels quite frustrated when she sees she's losing her golden opportunity.

[dirt-piper]

The TF2 problem

Don't take anything I say here as gospel - much of it is my own speculation and musings.

TF2 is my favorite game of all time. I started playing it wayyy back in 2012, and while I don't have that many hours racked up total (a meager ~1K), I can at least consider myself to be a few rungs above 'total n00b' in terms of familiarity with the game. I've experienced the best and worst eras of the game - from the Love & War update to the current botting crisis, and I have loved TF2 every step of the way.

But just because I love it, doesn't mean I think it's flawless!

Around 2015-2016 I noticed (alongside damn near everyone else playing TF2) that TF2 was changing, and not in a particularly good way. Love & War was in many ways a perfect update for TF2 - it gave attention and goodies to both the highly casual and the highly competitive ends of the playerbase, with a fancy new taunt system bundled with some pretty fun new weapons. At about this time, Blizzard announced the imminent release of their new game Overwatch, which was directly inspired by TF2 - and now presented itself as being a direct competitor to TF2 in its own niche. This, of course, turned out to be bogus - Overwatch is its own game with its own niche that has a playerbase nearly wholly separate from TF2's.

A common trend amongst the TF2 playerbase at the time was this sense of dread regarding Overwatch - either that it would suck up the entire TF2 playerbase, leaving the game to die, or that Blizzard would try their damnedest to manifest such a reality. Either way, a ton of die-hard TF2 fans began to absolutely loathe Blizzard's new game (before it even came out, I might add) for so much as daring to 'unthrone' TF2.

This entire premise is stupid. It's stupid now, and it was stupid then. But the fear became so pervasive throughout the community that, eventually, it seemed like VALVe was getting scared too. The tone and focus of TF2's updates began to shift far more heavily towards the competitive end of TF2's playerbase - which has never been the majority - as VALVe appeared to try to pivot TF2 into a stance where it could better "compete" with the upcoming Overwatch. Bits and pieces of this started showing with Gun Mettle and Tough Break, before Meet your Match completely revamped the game into a more competitive-focused format.

Why they would do this didn't really make sense - if VALVe wanted to compete against Blizzard's new AAA FPS with a competitive scene, then why would they try to remodel TF2 to position it as a "more valid competitor" to Overwatch when CS:GO was already a proven champion in that space? TF2 doesn't need to compete with Overwatch. It never did. So why would they expend so much effort to change TF2's course when, frankly, it was doing fine as-is?

Looking back now, with nearly a decade of hindsight and a bit more insight into VALVe actually works, I think the picture is a bit clearer, or at least the one I've formed in my head is. I don't think TF2's sudden drastic shift in focus was the result of VALVe scrambling to shore TF2 up against the onslaught of Overwatch - I think it was, rather, the TF2 team scrambling to shore TF2 up against VALVe.

VALVe is not a normal game studio. VALVe is not only lucky enough to be their own publisher (therefore making them a completely independent studio - yes, VALVe games are 'indie'), but also extremely lucky enough to be the de-facto publisher for nearly the entire PC game industry, thanks to Steam. VALVe makes money off of every single game sold through Steam whether they made it or not, essentially guaranteeing them a constant stream of exorbitant income regardless of their own output. They have a complete vertical monopoly of their own industry - they own themselves (VALVe has no shareholders whatsoever), they own their products, they own their publisher, they own their distributor - and now, with the Steam Deck, they own their hardware platforms too. VALVe answers to nobody but themselves, because they own everything that could possibly impact their business.

VALVe is, in a lot of ways, in a somewhat similar situation to AT&T (aka 'Ma Bell') back before the breakup of the phone company back in 1982. AT&T owned the entire phone network - from the switching equipment to the phone lines to the handsets plugged into them - and they charged every person in the country who leased phone service from them (you couldn't own a phone back then!) a subscription fee. AT&T, then, had basically infinite money to do whatever the hell they wanted with (though the government strictly regulated their commercial activities so they could not compete in any industry but telephony). As a result of this, Bell labs, the core Research & Development branch of AT&T, was in a very unique scenario - projects undertaken by Bell labs researchers weren't given budgets - they were given quotas.

AT&T didn't care how much money or time was spent on a project by a Bell labs researcher, so long as it ultimately resulted in something that benefited the company. And this model worked very, very well - Bell labs' researchers gave the world the transistor, the laser, the CCD, the Unix operating system, the C programming language, and received 10 Nobel peace prizes.

VALVe, through Steam, has a free, infinite revenue stream. VALVe's staff, then, effectively have infinite money and time at their disposal to make whatever they desire - so long as it ultimately results in something that benefits VALVe. Or, at least, so long as the people who hold the most seniority at VALVe think it would benefit VALVe.

It's no particular secret that the old guard at VALVe are, largely, unenthusiastic about TF2. Remember - Team Fortress is VALVe's oldest franchise. The original Team Fortress mod was released in August of 1996 - a mere one month after the Nintendo 64's initial release - a full 2 years before Half-life. Sure, VALVe didn't initially create Team Fortress, but they bought Team Fortress Software for a reason - Team Fortress was insanely popular. And it's not just TF2 that has absurd longevity, it's the entire Team Fortress franchise; here's a match from a Quake Team Fortress competitive tournament that is currently ongoing as I write this post:

VALVe acquired Team Fortress software with the premise that the sequel to Team Fortress would become an expansion to Half-life, thereby increasing Half-life's desirability by attaching it to the sequel of one of the most popular FPS games available at the time. TF2, of course, took a bit longer than expected - so Team Fortress Classic, a more-or-less direct port of Team Fortress to goldsrc, was released in 1999 to satiate people until the real TF2 came out.

That took another 8 years.

When TF2 finally released, it pioneered the concept of games as a service - that you could buy a game once and it would receive new content, features, fixes, etc. indefinitely - for free. These were not paid expansions or DLC, these were actual updates made directly to the game that anyone could get access to so long as they happened to own the game. And, once TF2 went free to play, the deal became even better. This model was utterly groundbreaking in 2007 - it's the standard for how most games operate today, sure, but only because TF2 proved how well it could work.

The issue, of course, is that VALVe was eternally working on TF2. By 2015, Team Fortress 2 had been in development in some form or another for 17 years. With this perspective, it seems understandable why some of the more senior members of VALVe would have grown sick of Team Fortress - they'd been doing or dealing with the same game for nearly 2 decades.

But, of course, newer hires at VALVe would have nowhere near the same level of fatigue - many of them were likely still very passionate about the game, and eager to continue its lifespan - but when the people who sign their paychecks and review their employee performances are sick and tired of hearing about Team Fortress, it becomes less and less attractive to pour effort into the game, no matter how much they may personally wish to.

Under these circumstances, the tonal shift TF2 experienced around the release of Overwatch appears more as an internal struggle - the remaining TF2 team trying desperately to prove to their seniors that TF2 was not yet ready to be phased out, that the game could modernize and remain relevant in the modern competitive gaming scene, that just because they were sick of TF2 didn't mean that everyone was.

So, they gambled. They bet TF2's future on a new revamp to adapt it to the then-modern world of competitive e-sports... and fumbled it pretty hard with Meet your Match.

The problem with the TF2 team's attempt to make TF2 more suited to the modern world of competitive gaming was that they seemed to overlook that, to the average non-competitive TF2 player, the game as it was was perfectly fine. Through Quickplay, any player could be automatically placed into a server matching their desired criteria and just... play. A server would stay on a given map for roughly 45 minutes (though players could vote to extend the map timer) regardless of how many rounds there were, meaning that everyone got the same amount of time to play the map regardless of how good or bad either team, as a whole, performed. This game players plenty of time to just... have fun playing TF2. There was no rush or hurry or incentive to play the game in any way other than how you wanted to.

This made TF2 very unique in the FPS world - the truest example of a "casual shooter". There were no ranks or rewards or incentives to play every day beyond random item drops and the enjoyment derived from simply playing the game itself.

The TF2 team's attempt to 'modernize' TF2 in Meet your Match effectively ruined this.

In addition to the introduction of a new, dedicated 6v6 competitive mode, Quickplay was replaced with 'Casual' - a matchmaking lite that tried to find a middle ground between the chaotic ad-hoc freedom of Quickplay and the more rigid, competitive structure of Competitive. It didn't work. Most TF2 players just wanted to play TF2 - casual forced them to stop and wait for the matchmaking system to find a server for them matching its desired criteria, stop and wait every other round for the server to change maps, stop and wait for matchmaking cooldowns to run out if they left a game in progress - so much time was spent stopping and waiting to play the game that hardly any was left to play the game itself. Yes, some of these problems have since been smoothed over, but Casual still forces the play to spend less time playing the game than Quickplay did. In my opinion, Casual, as it was released, could have been perfectly fine if Quickplay was kept alongside it. Instead, in one fell swoop, the way the vast majority of people played TF2 was effectively removed from the game.

In fairness to the TF2 team regarding this gamble, they were under enormous pressure - not just from a TF2 community growing increasingly paranoid about TF2's future due to the imagined threat of Overwatch - but also from the higher-ups at VALVe they were trying to convince.

However, the TF2 team snuck a back-up plan into Meet your Match - the Heavy vs. Pyro war. By outright promising a future major update (or perhaps two, even!), the TF2 team could at least insure that, no matter what their 'bosses' thought, they could justify their continued work on the game as fulfillment of a promise made to the community. And, if the new update was enough of a hit, it could perhaps inspire their 'bosses' to let TF2 continue to live on, at least for a little while.

So, the TF2 team pulled out all the stops for the next update. Jungle Inferno had an animated short, new maps, new weapons, entirely new features (ie. the contracker), it had a massive hype-spiraling 4-day-long update announcement, major weapon rebalances and overhauls - they clearly tried their damnedest to make the best TF2 update possible.

Whether or not the team managed to convince their superiors is unknowable. Jungle Inferno was followed by the fanfare-less Blue Moon update in early 2018, followed by radio silence. The TF2 team may very well have still been hard at work on the elusive Heavy update, but the double-whammy of the all-hands-on-deck push to get Half-life: Alyx finished and released immediately followed by the COVID pandemic likely reset whatever momentum or motivation the TF2 team had left.

This scenario, as described, is painful enough. From the outside, it appears as though VALVe had rebounded from Meet your Match, and was doing its best to improve the game in the wake of their own missteps, only to suddenly drop TF2 with zero explanation given. TF2 was left in a state of indefinite limbo with no clear outlook whatsoever on the future.

What made this infinitely worse is that VALVe had left the game in a state that wasn't just unfinished, it was broken.

TF2 has literally always had a botting problem. For the first span of the game's life, this generally manifested as idling/trading bots, but later on more and more bots began to appear that sought only to disrupt gameplay. Micspam, false votekicks, aimbotting, speedhacks, etc. - purely for the sake of irritating real players. Until Meet your Match, these cheating bots were relatively uncommon - real players could very easily either kick them from the game or simply join another server via Quickplay. Their impact on gameplay was no more than a minor, brief annoyance, and thus they were considered a non-issue.

Meet your Match's new Casual system, however, dramatically restricted the player's ability to hop to other servers when bots arose. Not only this, but the ability to switch teams at will was disabled on Casual servers, meaning it was now impossible to deal with bots on any team but your own (previously, if the other team was too slow to kick their own bots, it was possible to just wait for an opening on the other team, hop over, and call a votekick against the offending bot that would usually end up succeeding). Now, the disruption caused by a single bot was far more impactful than it had been before - because it was a far greater chore to either kick the bot or find a different server. Moreover, Casual outright incentivizes players to stick to the same server until the end - awarding them extra points the more they play, and nullifying any progress they've made towards a given contract that match if they leave before it ends. Players are thus, in effect, forced to play even when bots have made the game unenjoyable.

This resulted in a feedback loop - bots were now more irritating, so people complained about them more, so bot hosters hosted more bots, making them even more irritating - and that feedback loop has continued nearly unabated until modern day.

The TF2 community has been begging for an end to the botting problem for ages - and there have been genuine efforts from the TF2 team to try and fix the problem, but they have been too small and too infrequent to make much impact. And, to be frank, there is no way to effectively, permanently remove the bots. Attempting to keep any and all bots from the game would require enormous, constant effort from the TF2 team - something which is a very tall ask given VALVe's attitude towards the game for the past decade.

What can be done, however, is to simply make the bots less impactful. To let players more easily avoid them, to let players enjoy the game for longer so the bots are no longer such a nuisance, to let players have enough freedom in how they play that they are no longer forced to suffer through games with bots. It won't outright remove bots forever, but it will make them so much less of a nuisance that bot hosters will likely lose the incentive to bother with them. As soon as that happens, the feedback loop will be broken, and the botting issue will decline in severity as their potential impact on players' enjoyment of the game is neutered.

The simplest way to do this is to make Casual just as free as Quickplay was.

45 minute map timers, extensible by vote.

An Indefinite number of rounds per map.

Ad-hoc joining, leaving, and team switching.

Progress on contracts not erased by leaving mid-round.

These are not overwhelming changes. If anything, it's something of a return to form - not outright bringing back Quickplay, but making Casual into a suitable replacement for it - at long last.

And - most importantly - it's a one-time fix. It does not require an eternal arms race against bot hosters, nor a full return to frequent, massive content updates (though those would be nice).

One update to make TF2 more fun, to make the bots less impactful, and to give the game a better standing for the future.

One update to fix TF2.

-DirtPiper

[aois-amaterasu-painting]

UNKLE - War Stories | Misfits - The Misfits Box Set JMSN - Priscilla | Crosses - Crosses

Ruki Likes Music A Lot (a compilation of coverart posted to his instagram), featuring:

Skrillex — Recess    |    Mötley Crüe — Dr.Feelgood Tricky — False Idols |    BANKS — Goddess Björk — Vulnicura     |    Halsey — Badlands arai tasuku  — Sin of Children

[conceptofjoy]

cant stop thinking about ds' sprite pendant falling on the ground and getting doused in bro's blood WHAT.

puuure speculation of the order of events based on context clues, but it seems like right after bec noir is prototyped for the last time, bec goes for the weaker opponent like how he goes for karkat and terezi when vriska shows up in the alt timeline. he grabs ds, and that wing does nottt look like a clean slice. yk how spades slick gets his arm ripped off by sn8wman's whip...? around this time the necklace breaks off in the thrashing and falls. no character survives getting stabbed through the stomach so bro ends up minimizing the damage being done there but ds is totally unable to fight so bro fully takes over.

at this point, its hard to say if ds flees before or after he dies. the feathers on top of bro's body could be there from the wind or because ds was hovering over him. regardless, a short fight ensues, between bro and noir. he gets disarmed and shoved to the ground, noir spears him with his own sword, the end. ds comes back to bro's body after noir leaves to pick up the sprite pendant either way.

[taylortruther]

Rae, what trauma could the DM marriage/wedding rumors cause? I could imagine pain bec its what she wanted but never got, but trauma? What are your thoughts

i don't want to speculate but apparently DM has been aggressively pushing the marriage rumors as facts for months, which is painful, and i think being lied about on a large platform can be traumatizing in its own right. like, being a celebrity is psychologically damaging, what else do you call it?

but DM also posted stuff suggesting they broke up due to taylor miscarrying. whether it's true or not (i am, again, not speculating), it's a cruel thing to suggest, not just for taylor and joe but also anyone who might've gone through a similar situation. it's not harmless gossip.

also, i assume it was also a general statement - exploiting a person's personal life and dark moments for clicks and $$$ is probably pretty traumatic for lots of celebrities.

[horizon-verizon]

Just because HOTD might not show what happens after the dance doesn't mean it will end Aegon and Jaehaera's marriage? Because some important things happen after that?

and btw, I remember a podcast with Condal where he says he has more or less an idea of ​​how HOTD will end but that it's complicated because he can end with something but there's always what comes after, it's never an end point

Ending the series with Aegon and Jaehaera's wedding (which I highly doubt) is not an end point, because whether or not other things come together after

A) He really should think of how this show is supposed to end or have a strong choice so he can orient the entire show around said end...this is another indication of how/why the show is as weirdly written and outright badly-written it is. He just doesn't seem to know or take confidence in what he's writing and directing the writing of and partly bec he insists on treating it like a marketing project. He writes towards what people like and what will get them to watch instead of writing a story.

B) I'm not sure why I or the audience has to feel like this ignorance of an end will be like is copacetic thing, esp when it's not supposed to be a long prequel show. And I know very well that it could not end with a marriage or wedding at all; people are speculating precisely bec this guy doesn't know his onw ending AND the show has been a cacophony of bad decisions that have befuddled audiences in whether its inconsistencies of plot and character and whole events were intentionla for later plot twists, "complexity", or just bad writing.

[akookminsupporter]

Hey Rosie! How have you been? I've been thinking, what if Jimin and JK already planned out their schedules, travels, and that travel show bec they weren't sure if they'll be approved to enlist together?

What if JK looked stressed and pressured the several months ago while JM was promoting face bec, aside from missing JM, he wasn't ready to create his own album/wanted to go a different direction?

What if they did everything to ensure they could spend their last few weeks/days together so that even if they got rejected, they still had time to spend together? Of course, these are all purely speculations that I have, but imagine these two doing everything they can in their power, just to be with each other. 🫠🥲

It's hard to say, anon.

They had to submit the application for the buddy system several months in advance and we still don't know when exactly the documentary or series they made was approved. Junkook said that Jimin mentioned doing something like this a while ago and nothing happened after that until suddenly they were already planning the filming or something.

Although what you say is not impossible I find it hard to believe that's what happened because BTS and their agency usually plan everything well in advance hahaha.

I wouldn't be surprised if this was approved and planned when the group was planning the second chapter of their careers and above all, the content that they would leave ready to be released when they finally enlisted in the army.

I find it hard to believe that the decision to make the documentary or series was made on the spur of the moment.

That said, if they weren't sure they were going to enlist together or that their application was going to be rejected and they wanted to spend time together, they could have just done it. The documentary or series was not necessary to do that. They simply wouldn't have scheduled anything for the days they travelled to film for that content or they would have done it privately. Whatever they filmed was for them too and because they wanted to have fun but it was mostly for their fans, IMO.

[davekat-sucks]

Wow amazing art but this is strike one. Yiffy was the inevitable failure of postcanon, even with the new union and art team, her very existence ruins Rosemary, ruins Jade, ruins the setting and pisses off the fanbase no matter what you do.

Remove Yiffany and you retcon a major plot point of postcanon and the 4th kid for the new kids for the Candy timeline, keep her in and Jade is still a futanari who imposed herself on Rose to ruin the fanbase’s favorite lesbian couple and raise the kid with a fascist because… people on Earth C are too nosy.

Yiffany destroyed all hype for the original Homestuck^2 when she was revealed, even for as mediocre as the comic started out as, there were fans and speculation, which turned to spite for being so poorly handled. Even now with the new team, r/homestuck at least seems to enjoy the new content (excluding a few voices and r/englishpumpkinparty) but clearly any content with yiffany is gonna piss someone off.

Literally if Hussie just stopped at the epilogues the fandom would like postcanon more. It would have its detractor but it’s easier to defend the epilogues than Beyond Canon.

I can actually understand and connect why Jade and Jane became the way they are in the epilogues. Jane’s encounters with trolls were awful and the mothergrub does lay thousands of eggs to deal with such a low rate of successful brooding grubs. Jade was alone on her island and in a ship for 3 years (post retcon) and needs human connection desperately. My issue was the epilogues do a very one-dimensional and extreme version of these characters and justifies this by saying “no one checked in on them or helped” over the course of a 7 year timeskip and even after the characters did a whole webcomic where the point was friendship and connection is healthy for a human to develop emotionally to maturity, are we seriously doing this theme again?!

But Jane in Beyond Canon is a villain with barely any screen time or dialogue to ramble about why she’s “doing the right thing” and Jade is stripped of any nuance to this invasive and careless brat who tries to gain sympathy by whining about how much her life sucked/still sucks

I swear, this comic will go on hiatus again by the end of 2024 (if everything goes right) or on 4/13 (if it all goes wrong)

At least Jade was justified because 1. She didn't know how Grandpa English died and only came to the shocking realization she accidentally killed him (Tavros had also intervened too during this). 2. She had to grow up alone on an ISLAND and has no social cues how to properly act. Sure she would have Internet, movies, games, and books to read. But they aren't the true basis of human connection. 3. Neither Hussie, James, or anyone in WhatPumpkin/HICU had given a reason why Bec couldn't just teleport her to meet with the others since he still had Space Powers. Some could say because it would ruin the plot and Sburb wouldn't happen that it only took the meddling of MSPA READER in Pesterquest to do it. Her situation is just as shit like Jake English. And look how the series, writers, and nu-fandom shit on Jake despite his conditions is just the same, if not WORSE because of the lusus animals trying to attack him that he had always be training to survive for his life. At this point, drop any faith you have in James Roach and Beyond Canon. Apologize. And hope that this will fail hard that James and Hussie will just let the fandom make up their own ending. Even say DO NOT GIVE James Roach any money if they do go through with the Homestuck merch and vinyl. You are better off supporting the fandom itself. Pay for commissions, buy fan merch on places like Etsy, etc. Do not give shitty people like James or Hussie any cash. Go give Toby Fox some love too. Because he is one of the few sane people left and is successful outside of Homestuck.