#but also. the thematic potential of branch cutting out his own heart‚ regardless of the reason‚‚‚ oughhhhhhh

[razzle-zazzle]

*looks at your tags* nice, nice—

PROSTETIC HEART?????

Sometimes you have an idea so so wild but with so much interesting thematic potential that you then have no choice but to try and figure out how to make it work 🤷‍♀️

Anyway 💅 still working on the how but basically the AU is as described: Branch's fleshy magic Troll heart is gone and in its place is a prosthetic one he made himself. Smth smth a Troll's music is their magic and their magic is their music and smth smth you can remove a Troll's magic by removing their heart (assuming they survive, which they normally wouldn't, but Branch is nice and insane and good at clinging onto life like that). So the AU focuses on the issues that arise from having a heart cobbled together from the materials he could find and the sort of disconnect from the world around him due to the loss of the heart he was born with. Again it doesn't make much sense but it's fun to think about so 🤷‍♀️

[caledfwlchthat]

R:R(RR) theorypost: GAME OVER and the route to victory

I’m now at the point in Rose: Remember where I really have to decide how I’m going to wrap it up just in order to write new material.  I’ve put the poor dears through a lot, and am putting them through more, and they’ve been changing in response to it.  Do I just leave it hanging, as a meditation on the indifference of the multiverse?  Do I crush their hopes by revealing to them the truth that victory was never solely within their grasp?  Do I give them some small part to play in filling in gaps of the canon retcon timeline?  Or do I work to find a way for Rose’s plan to pay off, into an AU vision of victory diverging further from canon?

I don’t know that there’s any particular right or wrong answer for this.  My thoughts on how long the story should be, and how to end it, have evolved as I’ve written and more of the story’s potential has been revealed along the way.  I feel like I’ve taken some risks already, so whatever I do, I don’t want the conclusion to be a timid anticlimax. But while I could argue that the doomed timelines that have been revealed are all mostly canon-compliant, the essential nature of the canon retcon timeline is pretty much set in stone.  And we’re only shown, in canon, doomed timelines that somehow come back to affect the alpha.

Also, the reason I set “canon compliance” as a goal to shoot for is that I’m interested not only in the characters and their relationships, but the whole mythos and big-idea questions Homestuck poses.  Thus if I go the AU route, I want whatever I come up with to be heavily informed by the meta-structure and central themes of Homestuck canon, while interpolating somewhat to resolve the tensions I’ve already built up with the doomed timelines we’ve seen so far, and propelled by the momentum the characters are building in their shared dream-bubble afterlife.  I’m happy with the canon Homestuck ending, but I see the constraints posed by Lord English’s influence as a challenge to be curious about.

Regardless of what route I take, I need to think carefully about what GAME OVER meant and what the deal was with the retcon timeline in my view.  Again, better theory minds have thought about this in a canon context.  Items to consider below include:

the nature of Rose’s proposed plan in R^4;

the nature of John’s retcon powers and LE’s influence;

the details of Terezi’s choice to have John revive Vriska.

Mild spoilery stuff for R^4 under the cut, not in terms of any definite choices yet made but in terms of my reasoning about the scope and flavor of things to come, based on constraints from Homestuck canon theory.  (Major spoilers for the end of Homestuck though, if you’re just reading it now!)  If you’re a fan and want the inside scoop, or if you just have opinions, click the clicky.

Rose’s Cunning Plan

At issue here is whether to provide the doomed meteor kids of R^4 with a plausible path to victory, as Rose suggested in chapter 15: by allowing the meteor kids in a currently live timeline to meet their doomed alt-selves and receive game-saving cross-timeline support.  This choice recalls Vriska’s insistence on acting to remain relevant despite being stuck in the afterlife.  Similar things do happen in canon (Davesprite, the Aradiabot army, John joining Vriska’s treasure hunt), but less often, and perhaps not in the way Rose is talking about.  There is quite a lot of commerce between players and/or ghosts from different universes (Calliope, all of Openbound, pretty much all of Homestuck really), but much less from different timelines within the same universe.

This might be just as well, because if it happened regularly it would mean pretty much any player could become a Seer of Time/Mind/Heart after experiencing at least one death, in addition to all their other powers and abilities.  It would break something.  It seems as though it should be rare, or have a high cost attached to it (e.g. a Denizen Choice), or both.

What the cost should be, though, depends heavily on the context provided by the canon narrative, so let’s look at that.

John’s Retcon Powers and the End Run Around Lord English

My understanding of what happens in Act 7 is strongly informed by this comprehensive post (“Apotheosis and Creation Myth”), which sets out the entirety of the Homestuck canon narrative as the “alpha timeline” controlled by Lord English, and interprets the house juju and universe door as linked entities providing entrapment within, and escape from, the alpha timeline and hence the canon storyline.

This means John’s retcon powers are fundamental to Homestuck as a story.  If LE really is that powerful and has absolute causal control over the alpha (canon) timeline as a stable loop, then the only way to break his influence is to introduce acausal elements — which is what John does, by dipping his hand into the rich world of possibility.  This could consist either of pulling in extra-canon influences, or remixing influences within canon in ways LE couldn’t have anticipated starting from the initial conditions that spawned him.  Within the narrative, John’s actions fix a bunch of fairly prosaic problems with the GAME OVER timeline that could probably be addressed with regular Time player shenanigans.  But on a mythic or meta-narrative level, the retcon powers are absolutely necessary to neutralize LE.

This is why, in R^4, even timelines in which alt-Daves decide to use time travel to fix things end up doomed.  From within the narrative, if Dave can only travel to events along his own past or future world line, Dave actually can’t access the primary decision point John uses to fix things (reviving Vriska).  From a meta-narrative viewpoint, Dave is a Time player working only with elements LE has already doomed, so his efforts are hopeless.

I thought about giving Dave a Denizen Choice that could enable him to preserve the timeline and defeat LE.  Based on the above theoretical understanding of LE, though, the scope for that is pretty limited.  I could wangle things to give Dave retcon powers instead, but thematically they’re much better aligned to Breath than Time, and to John’s personality, so that solution would stretch plausibility.  Or I could get Dave to team up with John somehow — meaning the price would already have been paid and a Denizen Choice for Dave would be superfluous.  I might allude to Dave being presented with such a Choice, but it won’t play a major part in the action.

So any alternative ending R^4 produces has got to involve John’s retcon powers somehow.  This requires John to:

Participate in the treasure hunt and interact with the house juju to acquire his retcon powers;

Participate in at least one GAME OVER timeline to spur him to gain control of those powers;

Make his own Denizen Choice and claim the retcon powers as his own;

Receive information from some trusted source (such as a GAME OVER Terezi or some other cross-timeline Light or Time player) enabling him to F1X TH1S.

Technically it could happen that John never gains control of the retcon powers and just blunders into a solution, but the in-narrative probability of this is basically zero, and the lack of any meta-narrative cost would stretch plausibility.  This also illuminates why GAME OVER had to take place.  You could say GAME OVER is the true cost of John’s retcon powers, at a much higher overall price than his Denizen Choice (although the latter impacts John more directly, in terms of his knowledge of Retcon Jade’s loneliness).

A Multiverse of Retcons

What this also suggests to me is that John’s retcon powers could be even more of a problem for LE than previously implied.  The canon retcon timeline demonstrates at least one way to resolve the various problems that prevent the players from winning.  Any timeline that leads to victory needs to pass through the choke points defined by LE’s influence, but there are so many degrees of freedom in a timeline that it’s far from obvious to me that those constraints define a unique and immutable solution to Homestuck.  Thus, if I was able to think of another one, who’s to say John couldn’t have made those choices?

The Apotheosis post is optimistic and generous about the openness of the post-game world.  In principle, I don’t see why that spirit couldn’t extend to any alternative retcon timeline that could be made convincing.

The one problem with this approach that would necessitate a true AU, rather than an elaboration on canon, is the fact that LE originates from within the new universe created in the retcon timeline shown in canon in ACT 7.  This raises the question of what LE’s relationship is to any other potential universe created from a separate retcon branch of the alpha timeline not shown in canon.  If multiplying offshoot universes also multiplies instances of LE, the kids have actually made the situation worse for existence!  And if LE is associated only with the canon universe, that fact needs to be explained somehow too.  There’s nothing in canon that would explain why LE would be associated with any particular offshoot universe; we could call it “spontaneous symmetry breaking” which might be an acceptable explanation from a within-narrative standpoint, but not from a meta-narrative standpoint.  It isn’t elegant, in a way that galls me.

I’ll have to let that one simmer for a while but I welcome comments on it.

The Problem of Vriska

So, what are the choke points?  In particular, what context guides Terezi’s specific choice of intervention — to bring Vriska back?

This choice remains controversial, but upon thinking about it, it seems like the most economical choice that could have been made under the conditions.  Here’s what that single change accomplishes:

Brings Vriska back (i.e. prevents a major character death).  Doc Scratch telegraphs Vriska’s death as a classic LE move — saying that Bec Noir’s massacre of the meteor kids, but implying any other outcome in which Vriska lives was “certainly not an outcome the alpha timeline would allow”.

Absolves Terezi of the guilt of having killed Vriska, which certainly serves LE’s purposes — though this may be disappointing for those who want to watch Terezi grapple with and overcome this guilt on her own.

Enables Vriska to intervene for Rose and Terezi, keeping them out of destructive substance abuse and/or blackrom cycles.

Nonlethally removes Grimbark Jade from the action until Condy is dealt with.

Prevents a post-retcon Aranea from screwing things up all over again, since pre-retcon Aranea was inspired by dead Vriska to intervene and cause GAME OVER.

Provides the group with a player who is not only willing, but enthusiastic, to forgo entering the new universe in order to face off against LE with the house juju.

That’s a lot of stuff.  It’s pretty much a comprehensive catalog of Act 6 failure points.  If Vriska isn’t brought back, then all the rest of these other highly non-trivial things have to be dealt with by other people.  The other important thing John does is to exonerate Vriska re: Murderstuck, prompting Terezi to arrest Gamzee and thus contain LE’s influence through him — and even this isn’t totally unrelated to Vriska’s death sentence.

I remember Hussie getting a lot of flak for bringing Vriska back at the time.  The main accusation I remember was that it was lazy storytelling.  Some fans were glad to watch (Vriska) learn some humility and find flushed happiness with Meenah, and felt she was robbed of this development.  Others felt as though Vriska’s meteor interference was ex machina and robbed the meteor kids of the chance to develop more naturally; prior to the retcon, though, they were clearly all in arrested development post-Openbound, and needed some kind of stabilizing influence against Gamzee, or for Gamzee to be contained.  Apart from that things are all a bit hazy in my head.

So, can the R^4 kids win without Vriska in a way that isn’t implausible or distressingly expensive?  If it can be made to work, the result would be an alt-ending AU, requiring the story to depart from its relatively strict canon compatibility.  If we instead believe that the canon retcon timeline is the only way Lord English could have been defeated, this clamps down on the influence the dead meteor kids can have from their bubble, and gives the story an even darker and more fatalistic feel than it already has.  Of course, I have elements in motion to take some of the pressure off (*coughrosemarycough*), but it will definitely affect how the plot flows.