#but that didn't read as a Guilty Gear song reference when you can't hear the melody

[bisthefairy]

Me: The tooooooown, inside meeeeeee~ Me: Has a low overall GDP~ @zombielesbean: pPFFHHASDAHSHAA

[29pageshomestuckeveryday]

Homestuck, page 3,696

[S] ==>

Storyboards: http://readmspa.org/storyboards/03693.swf.html

Song used: At The Price of Oblivion by Malcolm Brown

song commentary:

Malcolm Brown:

The name comes from a line of Rose's during Act 5 while discussing her options of survival with Doc Scratch:

TT: But it's a little disheartening to learn I'm now faced with not one, but two suicide missions at once.

TT: One to destroy Jack's power source and defend all of existence, and another to ensure our cosmic progeny at the price of oblivion.

As soon (like, not a minute after) as I saw Rose go grimdark, I decided to wrote some hilariously ANGRY AND KICKASS BATTLE MUSIC for her (presumed inevitable) battle with Jack. The original sort of concept was something like the music of Guilty Gear - All guitars and organs and the like. It took several attempts to try and tone it into something useful, but in the end I decided to dig up Chorale for Jaspers - A previous bit of music used for representing the death of Rose's cat (The main themes here being the death of Rose's mother and the anger she feels afterwords).

So that's where we start, with a kind of messed up, creepy violin rendition of Chorale for Jaspers, before we start to build up and then kick into the main part of the song. Around 1:00 we here the music box chords from Black Rose/ return, then at 1:20 it's another Keytar Solo from me (I'd just bought it and was feeling cocky). The rhythm guitar and guitar solo at the end was also me and also something I was terrified to do since I don't normally do "Live" playing (Everything is usually sequenced). In this case, a lot of it was so difficult to do (Because I can barely play guitar. At all) at this speed most of it was played at a slower tempo and then sped up digitally (HAX!).

The drums were easily the funnest thing to sequence in this thing, mainly all the awesome fills and the double bass step at the end. The final guitar solo is an attempt to reference Rose's original "Strife" theme - Aggrieve. It's very loosely there, and I reckon needs to come back in some fashion since it's actually kind of awesome.

When Andrew told me he was going to use this one for a fight scene I was looking heavily forward to it. Imagine my surprise when just as it's about to kick off... John gets himself stabbed.

Author commentary: When you find the murder scene, that triggers the end of the game. John gets a vaguely sad look on his face, and the kids strike cool poses to begin what surely will be a very intense and long-lasting round of battle. Except for the fact that, outside of any logical reasons for the battle to be cut short, you know this is going to be a bullshit fight scene fake-out because I hate making battle scenes because they're a huge stupid waste of my time and energy no matter how "cool" you end up thinking they are. I'm insanely right about this, and cutting this battle short so I could go right back to writing long conversations between Dave and Terezi was absolutely the right call. Fanboys always wanted me to do more cool fight scenes and got grouchy when I didn't. It's one of the many reasons why so many fanboys of a certain ilk are completely terrible. Actually, in many ways a great deal of the thematic focus of Homestuck as a piece of metafiction revolves around my contempt for certain kinds of fanboys, which should provide a lot of material for discussion in the Act 6 books. Sounds great, right? Of course it does, and I know you can't wait to hear all of my good shit when it comes to the gratuitous write-ups on Caliborn-meta that is in store for you. In fact I would go as far as saying that much of HS, and Act 6 especially, reads as sort of an allegorical poison pen letter to the worst types of fanboys and their deleterious effect on the media they consume. It dispenses repudiation by profiling them psychologically, determining what they value most in media (i.e. in relation to the meat vs. candy binary), and strategically turning the screws through various acts of deprivation, fake-outs, long indulgences antithetical to their most cherished "values," and so on. If you could boil down my relationship with the "shitty fanboy" archetype via HS, all you really have to do is skip forward to the part in A6 where I'm talking to Caliborn through his giant computer and tormenting him by gluing his mouse to the desk, blaring loud music he can't mute, etc. That scene says it all about my ongoing relationship with these guys, and the manner in which I generally felt inclined to "serve" them through my work.

But that's all kind of a huge tangent in the context of the current scene. Bottom line: John gets insta-stabbed from behind by a teleporting dog with lightning-fast reflexes. Jack's been getting angrier the longer he's been sniffing John's scent without being able to follow it. He probably just didn't want to take any chances in letting him get away this time. Also he's super powerful and John still just sorta sucks? He gets better, though. Later while sleeping, Dream Hologram (?? I'll have to work on a term for that) John gets a rematch and holds his own pretty well. Anyway, this death doesn't stick, obviously. It's neither Just nor Heroic. So this cheap insta-slaying also serves as a good excuse to start demonstrating the mechanics of god tier resurrection.

The blood-spreading pattern is a callback to…the very first page of this book! Same exact wound from the same exact sword. The first from the front, the second from the back. Jack is great at stabbing John but bad at killing him.

Rose is pissed. Okay, this DEFINITELY means we're going to see a big awesome battle now, right? Right???

Actually, no, she just blows up the entire castle immediately, almost certainly incinerating the corpses of Mom and Dad, making funeral plans a lot harder. Roxy would be absolutely dismayed at this squandered opportunity for a grand, double-open-casket funeral. Revenge-looney grimdark Rose just doesn't THINK.

What a drama queen.