#does homestuck count as its own warning by now?

[tipsygnostalgy]

I'm going to put out something more coherent in the near future, but have you considered the analogy of the line & the sun to separate out Rose and Terezi's powers?

warning really fucking long post ahead again

THE ANALOGY OF THE SUN; Sun/Light vs. Mind

ok i cant be coherent about this atm but here are some notes i took

just because you have working eyes doesn’t mean you can see—you need light, which comes from the sun.

similarly, a mind can’t see truth on its own—light of truth/reality must allow for real knowledge. without such light, the “darkness” (aka beliefs rather than knowledge) is all you have.

THE ANALOGY OF THE LINE;

Seer of Mind and Seer of Light would both stand in the visible realm of knowledge (C & D, if you're familiar with the illustration of it) but Rose engages in some form of global skepticism and starts with doubt of everything at her very beginning—which, before she's able to engage in a much more healthier form of philosophy, leads to existentialist anguish and ergo Grimdark Rose. To my memory Grimdark Rose appears when she's at a moment of doubt regarding everything there is to know, having just learned that her Mom is dead and the Horrorterrors are (surprise) terrible—she's having that realization Descartes had in his little fire-lit cabin, except she doesn't have three armies and a formal edcuation's worth of experience to neatly declare cogito ergo sum and move on with her life. (Not that Descartes doesn't have his own critiques, with one of my favorites being this quick little piece by Mary Midgley.) She instead dies as a result—and then, in a moment of probably incidental thematic brilliance, her death as a result of global skepticism leads to her God-tier ascension into a fully-fledged Seer of Light. She is at the truest knowledge could possibly be—she's started with a doubt of everything, apparently figured something out amidst that, and now she's able to see the world for what it is. Thus her role as a Seer of Light falls within segment D, or noesis, meaning "knowing."

Seer of Mind, on the other hand, belongs in the "C"/dianoia ("thinking") category, in which one attempts to make sense of the material world but fails to understand that their abstract concepts aren't material of themselves (if I'm reading it correctly). An easier way to say it is that those who achieved dianoia are able to draw conclusions and infer using critical thinking/logic, but they can't realize that their logical systems could potentially be put into doubt. The example I can recall is a mathematician using numbers in diagrams to explain the world while taking the very idea of "numbers" for granted—in this sense, Terezi takes logic itself for granted when attempting to See what 'X' individual's next course of action will be, and that's why she doesn't end up God-tiering.

ARISTOTLE, CHANCE, AND VRISREZI:

So, what does taking "logic for granted" mean? Well, in terms of Homestuck, it means she's not accounting for Luck—something intrinsically tied with the Light element by virtue of a certain Vriska Serket. Aristotle goes on for a long time about the Four Causes of a certain thing and whether "chance" should be counted as a cause or not, and in that process separates out the difference between "chance" and "spontaneity"—while spontaneity encompasses everything that doesn't happen as a direct cause from someone, including Literal Randomness, chance involves direct agents/choices. So it was spontaneity that Gamzee happened to continue freaking the fuck out immediately after Terezi realized Aranea's mind control was relinquished—in the non-"you're responsible for literally and ultimately and fundamentally everything" sense—, though there's debate to be had on how much agency Gamzee has over his freakouts.

And one of her most iconic quotes, "We make our own luck," is delivered immediately before a feat on John's end that can be interpreted as extraordinarily lucky (do NOT get me started on John Egbert & Sartrean freedom, I will fucking implode)—of course, Terezi writes out individual courses of action for John to make by tapping into her abilities as a Seer of Mind (Seer of Logic/Decision; out of all the possible decisions made, what would work out?) but John's deviance from the instructions working out is luck. What makes this scene especially special, though, is that it's the closest Terezi gets to a God-tier mentality—she's recognizing in some sense that if you see enough steps/choices ahead, you can influence the chance of how things turn out, but she fails because she doesn't account for spontaneity.

Vriska acknowledges both spontaneity and chance, and through this she ascends to God-tier; she removes the chance that Tavros acts in a way that's different to her plans by mind-controlling him.... [TO BE CONTINUED].

(i.e. my laptop is at nine fucking percent im leaving this off for another day)

"quick" reflection on intelligence in homestuck:

i've been thinking about this a lot lately, especially in conjunction with my john post, so i just wanted to make a little reflection about it.

this is going to be relevant to a greater wip post on dirk strider & plato more generally, but i'm going to phrase all of this within the terms of the allegory of the cave (and more generally the metaphysics plato talks about in books v-vii of the republic) for clarity.

SO, if you somehow you missed out, here is the basics of the allegory of the cave: within the metaphor, a bunch of people are chained to the ground with their backs to the entrance of this cave, unable to look anywhere other than directly in front of them. behind their backs is a fire, and between that fire and the people there is a line of puppet masters holding up puppets reflecting real life objects that are then projected onto the walls of the cave for the chained people to see.

at some point, for some reason, a person (namely, a philosopher) will be dragged out from their chains, kicking and screaming, to the mouth of the cave and tossed into the real world. there they will be met by a number of new objects to perceive, all vastly different from the shadows on the walls that they had previously been seeing. instead of the shadow of a horse, they'll see a whole ass real horse, out in the daylight and everything, though first they might have to come to terms with seeing a reflection of that horse in water. essentially their perception of the world will blow their fuckin mind but by the end of it they'll totally love this new world of light and real actual objects and never want to leave it.

at some point though, they'll be obligated to come back and join the others in the cave once again. coming back down they might struggle to word exactly what it is that they saw outside of the cave, or may be laughed off by the people who have only ever seen shadows and only ever understand shadows, but because they have that knowledge, it is now their duty to lead the others, at least for a little while, before they can go back into that bright, sunny world again.

there are a ton of ways that this story can be relevant in homestuck, and i do wanna get into that at some point in the future (e.g. the puppets, light as knowledge w/ rose, plato's elitism especially w/ regards to the philosopher ruler, etc.) but for now to focus on intelligence:

there are two types of intelligence in homestuck, which can in the terms of plato's cave allegory be categorized as knowledge of the Forms (or the "true" intelligence that you gain by leaving the cave) and knowledge of the Mimics/Imitations (or the intelligence you gain by watching the shadows on the wall). note that plato gets hells of into talk about imitations around ehh books ii-iii i believe but also especially in book x right at the very end, mostly in his criticisms of the works of hesiod/homer (also yes this is related to the mimesis shit from detective pony).

in homestuck terms, these categories can be described as knowledge of the world and knowledge of the World, or actual knowledge of how real life things work vs. knowledge about the meta structure of homestuck as a comic and how the fictional world functions (the game rules, you could say). interestingly, meta knowledge about the world of the comic as a story seems to be privileged here, which perhaps makes sense since it feels more significant for a fictional character to be aware of details about their own story. to give an example that might help: this is knowledge about computers (understanding the shadows) vs. knowing that the laws of the world they live in is based around computers (understanding the Forms, or the origin of reality).

what this means is that characters designated as intelligent in homestuck can also be split along the same lines according to which kind of knowledge they have, which of course can change over time as well. take jade, for example: she is just generally quite smart in that she understands a lot of physics and quantum mechanics science-y shit, but also by the fact that she has access to some greater Knowledge at the start of her arc through the visions she gets from prospit. dirk is intelligent in the shadow-knowledge sense because he understands the history of humanity leading up to its eventual death at the hands of HIC, but seems to struggle a lot more to access that greater Knowledge, which i think is actually shown a lot more in the post-canon stuff w/ all of the ultimate self shit. jake on the other hand might be lacking intelligence in terms of shadow-knowledge (maybe, it's kinda hard to tell, actually- i would say this is true just because he doesn't seem to care all that much about studying in the same way dirk does) but he at least subconsciously is frighteningly aware of how the World works, as seen here (A6A3:4928):

JAKE: The demon you say im supposed to defeat? ARANEA: Yes. JAKE: Hang on. JAKE: Would that be the same demon im named after? ARANEA: Who told you that? JAKE: Uh... JAKE: I guess technically my own brain did? ARANEA: That's interesting. ARANEA: I wasn't planning on mentioning that. Or at least not just yet.

the most straightforward example here though is rose, who through her status as a seer of light just so so so perfectly fits into having knowledge of the Forms. the association in the original text of the republic of light and Forms knowledge fits this perfectly too.

one caveat to this view of intelligence is that it doesn't necessarily account for emotional intelligence, which i would actually put in a fully separate category that karkat obviously fuckin rules over (and roxy, to some degree). what's important though is that this structure separates out the intelligence of Omniscient/semi-omniscient beings (doc scratch, hal, kinda calliope but ehh i'll get to that) from normal super-smart kid intelligence, which is key when trying to analyze what characters are actually aware of, and from that, what we can actually trust when it comes to analyzing homestuck's lore. we really can't forget here that homestuck is a story told almost entirely through dialogue and conversations meaning that pretty much all lore comes through potentially biased narrators, something that is especially true for the alpha kids but really applies to pretty much everyone. sometimes the story will hint at knowledge that we can trust as fact straight up, i.e. rose explaining how dead/void sessions work in A6I2, but this is definitely not always the case and personally i think it helps a lot w/ analysis to be able to be aware of this.

anyways, some interesting cases that come out of this view:

calliope: calliope technically has knowledge of the Forms through how she is basically just a reader of homestuck, but because of that very same perspective she's also not a fully trustworthy narrator since 1. her version of the story is explicitly heavily redacted, and 2. she's in the same position as the audience in trying to piece everything together, meaning that all of her "lore" is really just theories that she's put together herself

terezi: i'm not sure what to make of mind as an aspect, especially in conjunction to light. i'm actually inclined to say this is, like, knowledge of shadows Plus since a lot of what we see w/ terezi is basically just knowledge of every possible timeline? maybe it would be better to put knowledge of aspects into a subcategory of knowledge of Forms, since aspects are kinda like laws of the fictional universe. the fact that mind is specifically put as complementary to heart (and therefore souls/identity) is also a really interesting idea and i wanna explore that more, it's such a weird aspect especially when you have light and all of its connotations right there

gamzee: gamzee's whole breakdown is basically just him gaining knowledge of the Forms and getting pissed about it (getting dragged out of the cave and not being happy with the world he sees) but i almost feel like there should be more to this since clowns are so fucking weird in general w/ all of the meta shit. it almost feels wrong to call gamzee a character after his icp-induced mind break, he loses his personality so strongly to the point of just becoming a fuckin plot device.

in conclusion: i need to talk more about dirk strider. LATER later

[edenfalling]

[Fic] “Frog Hunt” -- Homestuck

Summary: SBURB is not turning out anything like you'd hoped, and your game session may be broken. Which is a problem, because you can't go back to Earth -- last you checked, it's busy being an apocalyptic wasteland -- and judging by your most recent dreams, the rest of the Medium beyond your little Incipisphere is an equally apocalyptic wasteland of ghosts and horrorterrors. The only way out is through. You have to win the game.

Winning SBURB requires frogs.

Note: I started this fic way back in 2012, hit Jade's horrorterror dreams, and had no idea where to go from there. Last week it occurred to me that actually the horrorterror dreams made a perfectly reasonable ending, provided I filled in a missing middle scene, established an emotional/thematic through-line, and tweaked stuff until the new parts played nice with the old ones. So I did. :) [2,325 words]

--------------------------------------------- Frog Hunt ---------------------------------------------

SBURB is not turning out anything like you'd hoped. You wanted to see your friends in person, go on cool adventures, and save the world. You guess technically the cool adventure part is happening? But it turns out that being in the middle of an adventure is mostly very upsetting and dangerous.

Also your game session may be broken. Which is a problem, because you can't go back to Earth -- last you checked, it's busy being an apocalyptic wasteland -- and judging by your most recent dreams, the rest of the Medium beyond your little Incipisphere is an equally apocalyptic wasteland of ghosts and horrorterrors. The only way out is through. You have to win the game.

Winning SBURB requires frogs.

You have a lot of pointed questions to ask whoever designed the symbolism behind this process.

You also have no idea what you're doing. Zoology is not your thing! Botany and rocket science are your things!

But you've done crazier things in the name of friendship than breed magic universe-creating frogs. And this time you'll have Dave by your side, even if all he can help you can do is win the Olympic gold medal for synchronized flipping out, which might as well be a thing now since Earth is gone and if anyone ever reestablishes the Olympics it will be you and you can stick in any sports you feel like.

That analogy may have gotten away from you a little. You decide to preemptively consider it Dave's fault, and send him another message asking for an ETA.

"Kanaya says we won't have enough time to collect all the frogs, let alone raise them and do the breeding and mutation stuff. Not even if we yank Rose and John into the project, and especially not with just you and me," you tell him when he shows up in person, popping out of nowhere with two discs floating at his side. They look a little like Grandpa's old vinyl records, but with red gears turning underneath them. "Not that you aren't helpful! But there's only so many seconds until disaster."

Dave arches the backs of his hands, fingertips still ghosting over the ridges of his floating record thingies. "Harley, c'mon, work with me here. What's my aspect?"

You blink. Oh. Time travel, durr. Okay, possibly your flipping out was a little premature. "Whoops, forgot that! Potentially infinite seconds, yay recycling. So how are we doing this?"

Dave shrugs, letting the records vanish back into his sylladex. "We have limited absolute time, basically from when I got your house up to reasonable height to, let's say, an hour before whatever runs us off the rails goes critical. So we have to maximize our use of space -- duplicate this ectobiowhatthefuck setup and run an assload of slime zapper tadpole tanks at once. I'm thinking one on each of the top ten floors of your house. We'll do one floor on each master loop so we don't keep running into each other. Mark the space and time coordinates for each croaker we target, then head out to poke them or whatever literally the second after we zap them, take notes on any other frogs that look useful, and move down a floor and back in time to start again."

"What about breeding?" you ask.

You think Dave frowns. It's hard to read his expression behind his shades, but he doesn't guard his posture as much as his face. "Whoops, forgot that. Uh, let's say every third floor and third loop is for breeding and mutation games. Shouldn't be too hard, especially if we whip up a regular appearifier. They don't have these bullshit temporal lock restrictions."

"Sounds like a plan," you say. "Let's get everything set up and start breeding!"

Dave's discombobulated expression is so faint and brief that if you'd blinked, you would have missed it. Hmmm, you think to yourself. Maybe...? But no, you probably just reminded him of something one of the trolls said. They can be so bizarre sometimes.

"Time to rock and roll," Dave says, and you shake off your daydream and get to work.

---------------

It turns out that ectobiology is actually very simple! You don't need to know genetics or metaphysical zoology, which you were a little worried about. You just need to zap frogs and run their ghost slime through the game-provided machines until you hit a gene combination that pings a little automated reward mechanism. Scanning for useful frogs is a little trickier, since you get the reward ping for any potentially useful gene sequence even if it's one you already have on file -- you have to weed out the duplicates manually, which is time-consuming and a total pain.

Creating hundreds of potential paradoxes to make sure the appearifier grabs slime instead of actual frogs is also time-consuming and a total pain.

It would be simplest to just shoot the frogs, but first of all, that's mean, and second of all, it would probably screw up LOFAF's ecology to storm around wiping out its native fauna less than an hour after thawing them out in the first place. If you had a dart gun you could trust not to mangle the frogs on impact, maybe you could stun them for a few minutes. Unfortunately, all of Grandpa's guns (and by extension, all of your guns) are designed to shoot projectiles straight through solid objects and totally fuck up their day. Which means that instead of perching in a tree like a cool and sexy sniper, you are galumphing around on the ground, hot and sticky and covered in a gross combination of mud and panicked frog secretions. Ugh.

"I look like a swamp zombie, don't I?" you say before you can think better of the words.

"Yeah, but in a cute monster-girl way," Dave says. "I'm just a scarecrow that got left out in the rain and turned into a mold sculpture."

You look over at him just as a clump of mud and moss slides down the left lens of his shades. "Um. No comment." You are determinedly not noticing that he said you're cute. Nope. Completely thought-free zone over here, nothing but genetics and logistics, which everyone knows require no brain power at all.

Dave shakes his head in faux solemnity. "Tragic. Faced with the death and destruction of my awesome good looks and you can't even dredge up a "That's sad"? I am betrayed. I am devastated. I am--"

"--still cute underneath the glop, stop fishing for compliments," you interrupt, and are furiously grateful for the mud hiding your blush. Stupid Dave and his stupid... everything. Why do you even like him? He's such a butt.

Of course, all your friends are kind of jerks. Possibly there's something miscalibrated about your friend-finding radar. Or possibly you're also a jerk? Hmm. That's something to ask Rose about, whenever you finally get to see in her person.

You will get to see her in person. You refuse to acknowledge any other possibility.

"Ouch," Dave says, but the corner of his mouth quirks up just a degree. "Damned by faint praise. I guess I'd better step up my frog-napping skills, can't let my dashing good looks outweigh my knightly swag. Speaking of which, have we been standing still long enough for that little orange fucker to stick his head out?"

You glance around, then down, then up. There's a tiny flash of color just over-- you shift slightly-- yep, right there on the tree by Dave's shoulder. "Um. Yeah. Just... keep standing still. Really still."

"Making like a tree, yes ma'am Sergeant Harley ma'am," Dave says as you inch slowly toward him through the muck between the tree roots. "It's right behind me, isn't it? Getting all ready for a jump scare, gonna leap out and poison me to death with its slimy frog toes, alas, Horatio, here dies a fellow of infinite memes, taken from us too--"

You lunge.

You catch the frog.

You also knock yourself and Dave flat into the muck. His shades knock into your forehead. Your own glasses skew against his nose. Your left knee is jammed between his shins and his belt buckle is digging into your stomach.

Your mouth is right up against his chin. If you moved just an inch or two...

"Ooh, Miz Harley," Dave says, somewhat breathless.

"Oh, shut up," you say, and shove the frog into your sylladex as you scramble back to your feet. "Look who's talking, Mister Swamp Thing."

Then you bend down to yank Dave up, too, because fair is fair.

---------------

By the fourth loop you're ready to drop from exhaustion and the weird, indefinable tension of actually being around one of your friends in person instead of getting to mediate your interactions through computers. "I don't care how tight the schedule is. I'm starting to see double and I'm taking a goddamn nap," you tell Dave as you drop to the floor and lean back against the wall. You lay your rifle across your lap and keep your hands carefully away from the trigger. You know your temper sharpens when you're tired, and Grandpa taught you never to take chances with guns.

Dave frowns, and you know he's tired too because this time you can see his mouth curve downward to match the annoyed set of his shoulders and the fuck-you shove of his hands into his pockets. "The more loops we run, the harder it is to keep shit from falling apart," he says. "You that eager to trip into a doomed timeline? I can go back and hit reset anytime, easy as cake and pie and banana splits, but every screwup costs one dead Dave and one Jade abandoned in a dead-end universe. I don't even know if that you would get erased or keep on living until you go shithive maggots."

He's been talking to the trolls too, you remember, especially the teal one who uses l33tsp34k. He says her name is Terezi. She's been running time loops with him too. He likes her a lot.

You are not jealous. That would be stupid. You are not stupid; therefore you are not jealous. QED.

"The more tired we are, the harder it is to keep from screwing up," you say. "We're creating a whole new universe and we'll have to live there after we win the game. It's kind of important, Dave!"

Dave presses his back against the wall and slides down to join you on the hard tile floor. "We're not gonna win the game, you know. There is literally no way to do that. The game was borked from before the word go was a twinkle in its druggie teen mom's eye."

"Maybe this session's broken," you agree. "But that doesn't mean we can't find a way to cheat, and even if we lose, I'd rather lose trying my hardest instead of half-assing shit because I was so tired I fell asleep while operating complicated machines."

Dave sighs. "Yeah, okay. Naptime. But not here. This is a work floor; we've gotta keep it clear for work loops. We'll go crash further down." He taps your shoe with his own. "Up and at 'em, Harley, let's go hit that transportalizer."

You groan and haul yourself to your feet.

The obvious place for a nap would be your bedroom, but then where would you sleep on the next loop? Anyway, you only have one bed and it'd feel... presumptuous? pushy? maybe just go with awkward. Yeah. It would be awkward to share it with Dave, especially without John and Rose there as well to clarify that it's strictly a friend thing.

So you alchemize an armful of blankets and pillows and make a little nest in one of the hundreds of blank, identical stories Dave copied from the real-world part of your house. It's still a little weird sharing the space -- Dave is so close you can feel him breathe, every exhale stirring stray wisps of hair over your ears -- but you think you could get used to this.

You think maybe you want to get used to this.

"Sweet dreams, Jade," Dave mutters as he flops over onto his side, one hand curled loosely around the hilt of his sword.

"You too," you tell him, before you remember he's just going to wake up on Derse as his dreamself, still stuck in this stupid, lying, Möbius tangle of a game. And you're going back to those weird bubbles in the monster-filled void. Neither of you can get free until you finish Frankensteining your magic frog and beat an unwinnable game.

"Heroes always beat million to one odds in stories," you say to nobody in particular. "Why not us?"

Dave mumbles something unintelligible in response, already mostly asleep.

You wiggle sideways until your shoulder brushes up against his, so the warmth of his body radiates through the thin blanket onto you and your warmth feeds back into him. He's alive. You're both alive. Somewhere else in the Incipisphere, John and Rose are (you hope) also still alive.

You would do anything to make sure your friends make it out of SBURB, to a new world safe from meteors and monsters and predestination. Anything.

You dream of bloody, mangled ghosts, groping desperately toward you for salvation while you stand frozen under the horrorterrors' incomprehensible regard.

In the dream, you imagine yourself reaching for Dave's hand. You imagine him weaving his fingers between yours. You imagine Rose and John standing beside you. You imagine all four of you stepping through a door into a new universe.

If you imagine something with all your heart, that makes it a tiny bit less fake, and being less fake means it's at least a little bit real.

The pressure of the horrorterrors' attention attenuates, just that vital fraction.

You turn away from the ghosts and think of frogs.

---------------------------------------------

End of Fic

---------------------------------------------

If anyone has constructive commentary, I am all ears! Also I am going to bed soon, because being awake is overrated and also I took a Benadryl in order to eat a BLT for dinner, so, you know, probably better to lie down than to slowly drift off in front of my computer. *wry*

[callophelia-ailingamnemonic]

If The Omori Fandom Played Homestuck... [Pt 1]

Okay... so um... y’all know how I love assigning hero titles/classpects to characters and how I love the potential of Fandomstuck, right? Yeah, lmao so I decided to assign a hero title to my Fandomstuck interperetation of this psychological horror RPG game called OMORI! It’s a really good game and I had an idea for a hero title for them! And cuz I have a feeling this post is gonna be pretty long, I’ll go through what I think their lunar sway would be, as well as other things such as chumhandles, typing quirks, planets, sprites, strife kinds, and fetch modi in the next post uwu

Though please keep in mind that this is purely my opinion, and if you disagree with it, then that’s cool, you don’t have to listen to my conclusions! They’re merely suggestions uwu Additionally, all this speculation is based off of OptimisticDuelist’s own research and that this post will contain a lot of spoilers for OMORI, so be warned, and remember; this is all just for fun and to satisfy my Fandomstuck obsession :33

For the sake of not confusing the actual game from the character, I will refer to the game’s personification as ORI.

After playing the game, I strongly believe that ORI’S hero title is the Prince of Hope.

The aspect of hope relates to faith, possibilities, positive emotions, and all things imaginary, idealistic, and as my friend would say, all about “Faking it until you make it”. Additionaly, as quoted by optimisticDuelist, hope also “describes our faith in the narrative’s coherence, our excitement for building plot threads and our ability to immerse ourselves in the fictional world”. Majority of the game takes place in WHITE SPACE, a DREAM WORLD created by SUNNY after MARI’s death as a sort of coping mechanism to handle the guilt of the truth. Many things about the DREAM WORLD relates to hope, such as how SUNNY hopes to forget what really happened to his sister by immersing himself in the DREAM WORLD for the price of isolation in the real world (for FOUR years!) where, in the DREAM WORLD, everything is better because MARI is still alive there and all his friends are together and happy. The aspect of hope, however, is not just restricted to SUNNY/OMORI and WHITE SPACE, but also to the characters outside in the real world which is why I think the aspect of hope relates to ORI beyond the game’s protagonist. BASIL believes in SUNNY and that there was no way he could have killed MARI or vandilised all the photos, no matter how clear it was, and instead blames SOMETHING for all of it. Additionally, the rest of the cast believed in the lie SUNNY and BASIL created regarding MARI’S death and don’t even find out until the very end of the game if you get the true ending. We can also go a few steps further by bringing up the group’s hopes and dreams for a brighter future, SUNNY’s hope for forgivness and the fact that happy (And its other stages) are all positive emotions that play a role in battles.

Although I’m pretty set in stone about hope, you do see traits of other aspects throughout the game.

Time, since the aspect is linked to music, narrative pacing, decay, and is associated with photographs through the canon Knight of Time, Dave Strider. Right off the bat, we can link the whole photography thing to ORI since the truth is revealed to the player through a series of photos, and also that BASIL loves taking them. Additionally when the game brings us to the real world for the second time, we get to learn how the world SUNNY used to know changed in the last four years. Additionally, MARI and SUNNY played the piano and violin (respectively) and MARI died the day of their recital. If we wanted to go above and beyond, we could probably bring up how BASIL’S mental state takes a quick turn south when he finds out SUNNY’s gonna move, and on the last day, if left alone, will kill himself, which will either lead SUNNY to lock that memory away, or kill himself by stabbing or jumping off the hospital’s roof if the player gives up during OMORI’s battle. So yeah... lot’s of death.

Void and how it can represent secrets, lies, misfortune, and the unknowable alongside nothingness/meaninglessness and the physical world. This applies to ORI and how the whole reason WHITESPACE exists was due to MARI’s death and how it was covered up with a lie and how hard OMORI tries to stop SUNNY from discovering the truth.

Light, which represents imagination and true information, good fortune, and what’s important. Imagination also applies to WHITESPACE and how as the game goes one, we begin to learn the truth behind MARI’s death. 

Blood, which represents connection, responsibility, commitment to a collective, an attachment to the world and character dynamic. This applies to ORI and how despite the fact the characters had drifted apart ever since MARI’s death, they were all able to fall back together due to their friendship. Heck, the whole thing about them all being close friends is often seen and mentioned throught the game! In addition to that, the lack of connections ended up making everyone miserable and eventually, SUNNY owns up and tells the others how MARI really died in the end of the true end.

Heart, which reflects the soul, inner feelings, love and attraction, and platonic ideals of both people and objects. Additionally, canon heart players are known for roleplaying and personality splinters, which if you count OMORI (SUNNY’S dream alter ego) going around and protecting the truth by pretending everything is alright, then that kinda fits the heart bill as well. We could additionally go a little deeper by bringing up Sweetheart and the fact that the dreamworld is personal and important to SUNNY, since everyone in that world was either people in real life when they were still young or mascots from games and comics SUNNY knows of.

Kind of breath, since a part of the aspect includes detachment from the world... since... y’know, SUNNY HASN’T LEFT HIS HOUSE IN FOUR YEARS.

And kind of rage, since anger is one of the emotions the play a role in battles, and that a part of rage is that its contrivance is meant to make us see through the illusion of the fiction and focus on its flaws instead. This can be applied to how quickly the dreamworld falls apart as the game progresses, breaking the harmony time and time again, and constantly reminding us that everything is not as it seems.

Although these aspects could all be used to describe ORI, I still kinda see hope as the main aspect.

Now for the next point, why in the world would I think ORI to be a prince of all classes (Especially considering Homsestuck’s canon Prince of Hope)??? Well, I’ve already describes what hope is and how it relates to the dreamworld and its purpose, and then I’m gonna bring up what a prince (Alongside its passive counterpart, the bard) does; they destroy.

Princes are ones who destroys their aspect, or destroys through their aspect for themselves. As one of the most active classes, it can be stressfull for them to adopt passive roles, and tend to dominate the plot with the sheer impact of their actions.  Royals (princes and bards) are those concerned with aristocracy, nobility, and the great figures who shape society, and due to that, share a focus on birth-rights and legacies. Royals are often intensly devout to the cause they believe in and the people they love and are not afraid to fight for what they believe is right.  They tear down what’s old and stagnant to allow the flourishing of the new and are often formidable attackers, but also effective debuffers, as they remove their aspect from reality or wear down their enemy through its use. However, their reverence for high-class court society can make them judgmental or arrogant, and their greatest challenge is to resist the ego that would convince them that they’re above others.

The main reason I chose the Prince class for ORI is because they can destroy their aspect, and in this case, I will their aspect, being WHITE SPACE/the DREAM WORLD. As mentioned countless times earlier, WHITE SPACE is SUNNY’S safe place and their protection from the truth or what really happened, but as the game progresses, the player’s actions and OMORI’s reaction to anything that would reveal the truth breaks the illusion of the DREAM WORLD, before eventually, destroying it althogether in the end and (if you managed to figure out the hangman’s game) uncover the truth in the form of a broken realm known as BLACK SPACE. Additionally, the entirety of HEAD SPACE (WHITE and BLACK) was created by the game’s protagonist, which would already put them (SUNNY/OMORI) in an important position. If we want to expand on the whole aristocracy-nobility thing, we could bring up the fact that SWEETHEART is... I don’t really know what she is, but she’s super popular, rich, and owns a castle in the DREAM WORLD, and that CAPTAIN SPACEBOY/FRIEND is a well-known space pirate, and MR JAWSUM who is the owner of this hotel-resort thing. The fighting part of the Royals’ description easily fits ORI, since it is an RPG game. I could keep giving reasons as to why I think ORI would be a prince, and several other alternatives I thought would fit, but this post is already really long :’DD So the last thing I wanted to say about this was that the reason I thought ORI would be a prince, and not a bard, was mainly because of the prince’s activness and how as the game goes on, OMORI grows stronger before the final battle of the game turns into a struggle for power between SUNNY and OMORI.

Anywho, this is my really long explenation of why I would think ORI (My Fandomstuck interperetation of OMORI) would be a Prince of Hope! At one point, I did contemplate the idea of them being a witch, but then I felt as if that would have suited SUNNY more as an individual.

So yeah, that’s basically it and I’m gonna make another post later about all the other stuff afterwards, and to finish this post off, here is a picture I made of ORI using Gacha Club uwu (Cuz I have no drawings prepared ;w;)

[homespork-review]

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

[theorynexus]

Retrospective Analysis of Dirk:

After the initial thoughts I had this morning, following some light (re-)reading, I have come to various conclusions: The role that Dave Strider played in the Meat Epilogue was nearly identical to that that Dirk’s Bro (Alpha Dave Strider) played in the story---   DOOMed rebel fighting against the rise of another dictatorial Crocker.   I am sure that Dirk realized this, both considering the fact that this was an echo of Dave’s soul across the multiple instances of himself, and because he partially engineered this eventuality. Intriguingly enough, this might imply that Rose likely would have sided against Crocker (Jane) if her ascension had not incapacitated her and Dirk hadn’t been puppeteer-distracting her at the time (for reasons beyond her connection to Kanaya). More importantly, it helps establish an important further parallel:  Dirk acted as the puppetmaster in the shadows, essentially controlling the election and determining its outcome from the beginning.   Lord English remained the most important force in the Alpha Kids’ world and session in much the same manner, despite )(er Imperious Condescension’s attempted Rebellion. Both individuals were playing broader and longer games than the women they were manipulating to suit their purposes.  Though Dirk’s purposes have not yet been revealed to the fullest extent, Jane Crocker had a narrower perspective that failed to grasp the true nature of the battles going on and underestimated her “supporter” ‘s power and intentions. This relates to another way in which Dirk Strider and Caliborn/Lord English:  Both of them represent iterations/avatars/fulfillments of the idea of Calmasis---   both tricked a Calliope into losing a major confrontation by making her confuse an attack on one piece with that of another (a major short term/immediate objective--- an attack on a queen [in Dirk’s case, Jake English/the election] ---with an attack on the king [Alt!Calliope, who acted as essentially the commander of the forces opposed to him]); furthermore, and more importantly, both act as protagonists and antagonists to the story at the same time (villain and anti-hero).   Dirk presumably sees himself as working towards the perpetuation of reality by forcing more conflict into an otherwise ended story; or alternatively, sees himself striving for freedom in opposition to causality and enslavement to cosmic will (which would jive well with his Kamina-esque aesthetic).  Meanwhile, Caliborn/Lord English obviously served as the main villain of Homestuck, but were also the protagonists of their little side adventure and was trying to develop himself and expand his horizons despite his severe disadvantages, much the way the Kids and Trolls did. Dirk’s fulfillment of that role may have actually been why he downplayed the importance of Complacency of the Learned in his conversation with Rose just before he began to subsume her will in earnest. Of course, that is somewhat speculative, and hard to prove, one way or the other. ... Regardless, upon making these sorts of connections, I began to think about whether Dirk was intended to become a villain from the moment he was introduced, and/or relatively early on.  Andrew Hussie seems to have a habit of working out many plot details a great deal in advance (see the Alpha Kids being hinted at as early as Act 4 with Jake’s letter to John, Doc Scratch probably being intended to have been/contained at least an iteration of Dirk from the beginning [as shown via his comment to Rose that she ought to think of him as a kindly human uncle figure-- shoved in our face via a certain Truthsplosion]), so the idea didn’t seem all that farfetched. After all, as referenced in the above parenthetical reference, Doc Scratch shows that Dirk always had at least the potential for villainy in him, under the right circumstances. The first thing that jumped into my mind (other than the fact that Bro is a bit of a dick, I guess, and the early narrative of Act 6 emphasizes the fact that this is in fact the kid version of Bro quite a bit) was the fact that Dirk’s introductory period created clear parallels with two trolls of a highly corrupt moral character---  Vriska and Equius:   Beyond the obvious tendencies to manipul8 others and his willingness to “cheat” in certain ways (defeating Squarewave in a rap battle bit exploiting his weakness to liquid shorting him out, teleporting his head to Jake for the revive+kiss with the intent of forcing a start to their relationship that way, et cetera) Dirk is also pining for a Page who he attempts to force a redrom with (more effectively, in his case, at least in the short term), and whom he attempts to “groom” by pushing challenges that the Page is clearly not prepared to face his way (Brobot’s awkward difficulty settings parallel the FLARP encounters  Vriska gave Tavros).    That Vriska and Dirk’s first on-screen kills were both decapitations is probably a coincidence. As for Equius:  There is the wife beater that Dirk sometimes wears, the similarities between horses and musclebeasts, the fact that both build robots whom they then face off against in lethal combat, the fact that both wear shades and are initially blacked out upon introduction (though this latter matter is of less significance) the fact that both have dominating personalities and a secret kinky submissive side (albeit these play out in different ways for the two), the fact that Brobot and Aradiabot both take out their “hearts” and POUND POUND POUND them up dramatically (note: though this is a bit of a stretch, the parallel makes the affinity’s intention obvious), their willingness to lie and take extreme measures (Equius considers lying and double-crossing to be in a blue blood’s nature and/or their “superior” culture; Dirk outright tells Jane that one of three statements he is making is a lie, and the only one it could possibly be is that he believes that Roxy’s decision to blow up Jane’s computer as a way to scare Jane away from playing was too extreme [meaning that, since this was a lie, he is absolutely willing to go to such extremes to get the job done--- as shown later with his willingness to decapitate himself, publicly display the fact that he’d killed Hegemonic Brute, et cetera])... and most obviously+ominously, his declaration to Jane that while she was going to remain the group’s leader as far as everyone else was concerned, he was going to be the person controlling things from the shadows (which is a reversal of Equius’ demand that Aradia be the shadow leader for the Blue Team, but obviously calls him to mind via allusion/reference). Now, while a case can be made for either of these characters not being that bad, and I am personally someone who likes and feels for Vriska quite a lot, I will be the first to admit that she is the closest thing the trolls have to Caliborn or Dirk (Gamzee doesn’t count: he’s has a mental breakdown and is basically brainwashed by LE via Lil Cal; he’s not a planner or someone who went out of his way to embrace his “turn to the dark side” of his own volition--- if you can call it that, for Caliborn; you know what I mean).   As for Equius: he was highly violent and could have been quite the menace, if it weren’t for his moirail. He had a generally demented mentality.           Neither of these are the sorts of comparisons you want to be made with a character being painted as particularly heroic and good.  Next comes the fact that, as I have discussed previously, Dirk Strider and Caliborn/Lord English have been deeply entangled with one another’s fates.   Caliborn liked Dirk the best out of all of the Alpha Kids, it was ironically Dirk who ended up defeating him in the end (in both the form of soul trapping and via ARquius). However, it was also Dirk who provided Caliborn with the mechanical leg that allowed him to escape (and presumably have confidence in the idea of escape) from his SAW Room Death Trap binding with Calliope.  Presumably, either Dirk or AR must have figured that that was the intention behind the request/present, at some point. (I rather doubt it was something that Dirk knew the implications of at the time, but I wouldn’t necessarily rule out that possibility. He might not have cared, especially since that was years before the Alpha Kids began their session, and he/they might not have had much of a bond with Calliope, at that point. Not that he ever got all that close to her, generally.)  Note:  Caliborn’s favor toward Dirk does not necessarily suggest anything inherently wrong with Dirk, but it helps set him apart from the others. This is just another warning sign suggesting something “off” about him.      Dirk’s “I have failed,” before he went wandering off into the glitches and self-destructed in the [S] Game Over. version of the Alpha similarly can be interpreted as hinting at his God Complex/Megalomaniac tendencies.      It seems a logical extension of his general personality that he wouldn’t be able to settle down and enjoy a peaceful life in a “perfect” paradise planet (which is probably one of the reasons he decided to leave it). I suppose this is just another thing that wasn’t generally thought about as the community was so focused on the actual process of getting to the victory point, and what that would mean?   At the very least, I don’t remember any such considerations.  There were certainly warning signs. The biggest factor that convinces me that Dirk’s villainy was planned quite early on (and which thus supports to some extent the idea that Jake is meant to be his eventual foil) is that Dave, after seeing his Bro’s corpse, said, “I’m not a hero, my bro was.”   This was almost certainly made at a point where Dirk Strider was conceptually developed/invented already, definitely was at a point where Dave’s baggage surrounding heroism and its connection with how he felt toward his brother was in play, and most certainly was well after the audience could have seen that Bro was abusive and sortof a dirtbag. Thus, there was already some irony, there.  However, he also called John a hero in that same statement, so it clearly was not totally derogatory, and so the irony could be increased. It was, as shown by the fact that the Alpha Kids were not “Heroes” of their session, but Nobles. This was not enough.  Dirk has eventually turned into the anti-hero and villain of his own story.   Perhaps this might be enough; however, it wouldn’t quite feel fully “right” if he hadn’t been intended to have been so from the beginning-- and perhaps that’s actually why their group were called Nobles in the first place, not only because of the fact that they couldn’t complete their session without the others, but because not all of them were heroic at heart.  [Non-sequitur: I wonder if LE would have been anywhere near as dangerous, if not for Lil Hal’s capacity to make incredibly complicated calculations {needed for Furthest Ring travel, among other things, presumably}, and his capacity as Doc Scratch to pave the way for LE’s arrival. This would seem a very similar relationship to how Dirk facilitated Caliborn’s entry via the leg, in retrospect.] ... While the section immediately above isn’t as well-developed as I’d like-- mostly because I’m tired, distracted, and it’s been at least 3 hours since I started this post in the first place, and I want to at least get the last part that I thought of in before it leaves my memory.    I may add to/edit in more for this post, or post follow-up material later, when I remember more that might have slipped my mind on this subject/I think of more. Anyway!---    as I was considering all of this, a very intriguing thought popped into my head:    While I had initially assumed that it was simply to not rehash old material and/or that it was to keep us with John for the sake of narrative consistency, since I now know that it was Dirk who was narrating this segment of the story, and thus it was a narrator with bias and interest in the facts being related, it has occurred to me that it is actually quite odd for Dirk to omit some relation of the actual facts of the Caliborn’s Masterpiece encounter.   We are placed by his hand at a place even further removed from the reality of the battle than the clearly biased and somewhat embellished account that the Cherub gave of his own rise to power.        This strikes me as odd particularly given the fact that it is Dirk’s great moment of heroism, which might serve as a sort of counter-balance to much of his otherwise morally questionable deeds.         Given his egotism (and the fact that there would seem to be no OOC reason strong enough to justify such an omission on the author’s part, since this means that there is no faithful depiction of the battle shown to us in the story), this makes it seem as if Dirk chooses to not show the conclusion of this battle for some specific and tangible reason.  I would not suspect it to be out of embarrassment, a desire to conceal his identity longer, or plain trollishness (though the last of these strikes me as almost being fitting).  Rather, I wonder if there is something worth concealing in the end of this encounter.  Maybe the Alpha Kids actually lost, and Dirk’s placement of Cal into Lil Cal was an act of capitulation. Maybe Dirk otherwise willingly and knowingly created Lord English via the soul trap at the behest of ARquiusprite, or said sprite tricked him into doing so, claiming it was the only way to defeat their opponent (which it was) and omitting the consequences.     I do not know which of these, if any, is the correct answer, but Dirk being the one to choose to omit the details does, I shall repeat, seem extremely fishy to me, all things considered. ~~~ While I will not put a summary here, I would just like to say:   In retrospect, the Meat Epilogue has done more than the requisite “adding on to the story in appreciable ways and tying up loose ends,” but has served to add depth to an already incredibly deep story and caused me to reconsider and better understand characters and themes which I had not previously delved into so deeply before.    I wonder, now, if Dirk Strider and Lord English shall prove to have been even more deeply connected than it has seemed up to this point, once I have reached the end of the Candy Epilogue and thus will be allowed to properly investigate what’s going on at the beginning of Homestuck^2. Final thought:  Hmm. So much of his imagery speaks to him being a sort of twisted version of Kamina (embodiment of masculinity, warrior spirit, noble sacrifice, heroism [not being able to live up to those last two, and lampshading to some extent his frustration at that, in Epilogue Part 7]), but it also vaguely seems to me that he at least sees himself as being like Simon--- this is to say, leading the charge for freedom against the forces of determinism and the chains of repression that would hold back humanity (and/or himself). It’s a very striking thing, especially considering the fact that it is only Simon who takes the fight to space in a fancy ship, once what seems to have been the final villain was defeated and the real threat began to loom on the horizon.  I wonder how this contrast will develop in the future, and how noble his true ideals may in fact be. ~~~ Major Edit:  

What. The heck. How did I not remember this blatant nonsense?    Fricking... darn it.

[rangerdew]

literally nobody cares but i have some opinions on red versus blue ‘canon’ because for a show like this without a set beginning and end and plan it’s more difficult to define. like, as opposed to, say, utena or like idk bro the movie Up by pixar. anyway personally i think that season 10 was the canonical ending while seasons 11-13 are ‘dubiously canon’, as the homestuck epilogues put it, while any seasons after that are like, the equivalent of homestuck^2, or at least in my mind not canon.

content warning: speculation and possibly person having a bad opinion online. read onward at your own discretion.

the first time the director of the show changed to someone who wasn’t one of the intial rvb creators was when s10 ended. so i guess for me, it begs the question: why step down? it was probably because he didn’t have anything left to say. 

s1-10 build on each other and are very um not sure if economical is the right word but whatever about their information. it’s impressive how they weave the story despite not having planned it out. like, idk how to really explain it but it’s about church, tex, project freelancer, etc. and it culminates and says what it needs to say with what it’s built with red vs blue over the years.

when it hits s11 you can feel that there’s a shift in that they suddenly introduce a lot of new information, and all at once. it like, loses track of its footing on a neat contained little narrative. and later on through seasons 11 and 12, it feels like the story has gone further down that path and spiralled out of the gravity and motivation of the characters. 

which just like isn’t how rvb is supposed to be? imo? on top of it not being very compelling that the people are no longer driving the plot i think red vs blue has always been a very individual interpersonal centralized show, even if they don’t actually like have characters develop within the team until s11 (which is part of why i liked it so much lol like omg consequences!!) its like About The Little Guys or whatever. 

um in a way it feels to me a slightly different versions of the paths the characters and storytelling in homestuck and taz: balance went (though homestuck was much more self aware about it) where they start out as humble improvisational little things and then in the end the story kind of has to come to terms w the fact that your humble mcs are, like, big dudes now. and i think taz does this very badly in that suddenly these guys are not like your everyday guy sticking it to the man but wealthy businessmen, entrepeneurs, cosmically important people. 

once the characters become those big people, it’s like you have to be careful that your story still holds up w the same themes & messages it used to, i think? 

anyway, that was a tangent. what i’m saying is that even though i really like s11 and by extension yeah s12 and s13 you can stay, i don’t think they technically count as ‘canonical’ by like the planned story that was meant to be told with the project freelancer things.

part 2: why i think s13 works as a dubiously canon ending

it’s a really thematically nice ending. 

like, a lot of red vs blue is about trust. so the final moment being that both you and church have to live with the 'just trusting’, in an irreversible kinda way that, you know, is death, and the fact that you’ll never know... it’s just good. it’s just awesome.

anyway thanks for listening. 

[sometipsygnostalgic]

Hiveswap  Review (Spoiler)

We’ve been waiting an awfully long time for the Homestuck Adventure Game. First kickstarted in 2012, it’s gone through a troubled development cycle between 3 studios and.... yeah, you get the drift. Even in its final form, Hiveswap has gone through numerous unexplained delays (most infamously the last minute January Launch Month delay), and the development team for it had been very tight-hush until the end of August when a final release date of September 14th was announced. 

Now that Hiveswap is out, we’re able to see for ourselves what the development team has been working on. Does it hold up to expectations? Does it make up for the hard delays and extremely concerning lack of communication? 

Those are answers you can only decide for yourselves. What I will say, however, is this: Hiveswap is a charming and visually stunning introduction to the Homestuck world, that combines only the best of Homestuck’s humor with a new calmer, more curious and coherent setting.

It’s a shame, then, that the content of Act 1 isn’t a little bit longer. However, the gimmick of combining any item with each other and getting a new description will draw out the length for any lore completionists.

Before I start gushing about my feelings on Hiveswap, I’d like to point out something that REALLY soured the game for me: The cutscenes have a processing power so high that most laptops - including my own -  aren’t able to handle them. I don’t understand this, because a 2.20ghz processor can handle the game like a breeze. I’ve had no trouble running Hiveswap. But as soon as a cutscene plays, it ends up taking a processing power that would burn a computer which can play Overwatch. What’s going on here? Why are cutscenes like this? Is it something to do with the Unity engine? Surely another user has figured out how to compress scenes without losing their quality!

So, I had to watch the game be played in its entirety by @neproxrezi, only returning to my own game to test out as many combinations as possible. 

To make this easier for myself, I’m going to split off Hiveswap into a few categories:

Story and Characters - Hiveswap Act 1 is extreeeemely short, like 27 minutes long if you do an ameteur speedrun. On the surface, not a lot happens, but it serves as a compelling introduction to the Hiveswap world. You start off as Joey Claire, a young dancer of multiple schools with a hatred for pogs, Bubsy, and her entire life circumstances. Joey works with her brother to hide from a bunch of monsters that have invaded their home. Shenanigans ensue, mostly pigeon-related, and using Jude’s cryptic advice Joey figures out how to retrieve the attic key. Once in the attic she uses a precious heirloom key, which looks suspiciously Cherub-like, to open a SNAKE PORTAL..... Joey is transported to the world of Alternia where she meets a self-loathing rustblood of the bottom rung of society called Xefros, and explores the house of his controlling and paranoid Revolutionary moirail Dammek. Then Joey gives Xefros some words of encouragement and saves him with the help of Dammek’s lusus, then they ride into the distance while dodgy heiress Trizza Tethis takes a selfie over the burning neighbourhood. It’s all pretty basic, but a natural stopping point and setup for act 2 that makes me devastated I can’t go and play it immediately.

When you dive deeper into the game, usually by clicking on everything you see and combining as many items as possible, you can learn a lot more about these 4 characters. Joey in particular gives the audience plenty to think about once you start messing around with her; combining the green Cherub key with items will often leave her reminiscing about her absent mother, and clicking on Jake’s items strewn all over the place will show how she resents his constant absence fom her and Jude’s lives. There’s plenty of information about Rose’s mom, too, who’s their drunken babysitter and.... even now, not the best stand-in for proper parenting. I’ll talk about these two more later but it makes me curious about their circumstances in Homestuck. Meanwhile Joey and her brother Jude aren’t as close as they could be. Joey’s alarmed by how cryptic and secretive Jude is, wrapped up in his conspiracy capers, and she has great difficulty undertstanding him or having a normal conversation. This is highlighted when she assumes he wouldn’t have any care for his mother’s heirlooms if they didn’t have anything to do with aliens, and when she unlocks the Cherub portal despite his warnings because he never told her of its dangers. Joey does think about this distance between her and Jude, especially when locked on the new world. 

Xefros, meanwhile... everything you click while in Alternia - whether as Joey or as Xefros - will usually have information about Dammek. Xefros is clearly used to being messed with by Dammek’s "tests” and revolutionary spiel , which seem to be a more extreme and warped version of Jude’s conspiracy capers.  Inspection of his house will paint a picture of Dammek as having a very cluttered mind, hyperfocused on his goal without seeing any of the world around him or understanding the needs of his puppydog moirail Xefros. Now, Xefros himself is extremely passive and will do whatever other people tell him, which is kinda Tavros-like but more extreme. He doesn’t have any care for what happens to himself so long as he’s impressed those around him, and it’s not until Joey tells him how cruddy this is that he gets slightly relaxed and more optimistic. It’s ironic to see how Dammek and the Alternian revolutionaries end up falling into the same heirarchy that they strongly oppose. It shows the Revolution might be a joke, one of many others the Highbloods have quashed before.

As for Jude..... I wonder what’s going through that boy’s head? We barely saw him and yet he made a strong impression of his personality.

Gameplay - Hiveswap doesn’t have any “gameplay” in the traditional sense, unless you count the snake game. Instead it has a series of puzzles. They aren’t very difficult, but it’s more the funny dialogue you can read while playing. I’m gonna talk more about the humor in a few seconds, but the way you can combine any item with any other item must have taken soooooo much time from the writers, especially Cohen Edenfield. I wonder if this was always going to be the case in the original game too? 

There’s not really any failstates for hiveswap. You can get eaten by monsters if you dick around on your way to the attic after the big fight, but you’ll just respawn where you were before. It’s not a game I’d choose to “play”, exactly. It’s more of a visual novel. 

Humor - Oh boy. This is where Hiveswap wanted to nail it so, so bad. And its effort was valient to say the least. Joey’s dancing was some visual feel-good humor, all the 90s gimmicks in her room (especially the not-so-subtle videogame posters) had me clicking on them with every item i could find in the house, xefros in his entirety was a well of dark humor that pushed the game’s atmosphere back to its homestuck roots, and Byers - so true, so brave - he is the best item in the game. The funniest scenes for me were the Pigeon sequence with Jude, and Joey’s acrobatic pirouhettes away from Dammek’s terrifying lusus :P

I do have some criticisms for the humor. While combining everything with everything is a lot of fun, it’s not necessarily... funny. Like I didn’t get a lot of laugh-out-loud moments with the combinations. Often I found jokes were either too long-winded beyond their expiration or the punchline was just very awkward. This is a small criticism considering no other games bother to do this, but considering hiveswap act 1 is just an hour long if you DON’T do this, the game’s padding could have been more entertaining to say the least. counting on this gimmick when the humor isnt the best in the world, it’s a veeery risky move. 

Graphics - okay, let’s put this out there: hiveswap without a doubt is one of the most visually stunning indie games out there. It recruited the help of many artists from the fandom itself, like adrienne garcia, angela sham, dammek the tumblr user, rah-bop, shelby cragg... For the most part the game looks great. The drawings on the short panel-based animations look wonky sometimes especially when compared to the beautiful opening animation, but it’s a small criticism. 

This has convinced me that the move from 3d to 2d has seriously benefitted Hiveswap. I mean, look at this:

then look at this: 

it’s a whole WORLD of difference. I seriously do not think Hiveswap would have made a good impression if it had released in the crappy-looking state the 3D studio had produced it in. The game would have not looked like homestuck, and not been able to pull off any of the animated feats in the final product. Why were they going with that art style in the first place??? It was a waste of time money and effort. I guess that the 2D team was slowly constructed over years of producing homestuck flashes and paradox space content? Many people key to the current team were in high school in 2012.

Music - Led by James Roach, he worked closely with Toby Fox to really nail Hiveswap’s soundtrack. It’s short and loops an awful lot but I never found it boring or annoying to hear. It’s quieter and more subtle than Homestuck’s loud, rambunctious music, but each character has their own theme and leitmotif. The music changes to create a good atmosphere for each room. It’s not the best work from either artist, but it’s very good as a videogame soundtrack.

Dedication to the source material - While Hiveswap has adapted away from Homestuck’s crude humor, I feel it keeps the best and throws away the worst. Hiveswap being E10 rated made some people suspicious because of how sweary and dark Homestuck is, but Hiveswap has already shown its guts and some very effective dark humor. I wonder if Act 2 will have the same rating?

While the atmosphere in Half-Harley Mansion isn’t the most Homestuck in the world, Joey’s introduction is a nice homage to how all homestuck characters are introduced.  And.... you can’t ignore the insight it gives into Jake and Roxy. More specifically, Grandpa and Mom. 

So, it’s revealed in Hiveswap that Jade’s Grandpa had a wife and two kids before encountering her. What does this say for Jude and Joey’s situation post-hiveswap? Did he lose his two kids, and decide to build a new life in the pacific with Jade? Did he see her as his second chance?   It sort of puts a damper on John’s comment that Jade’s ‘pa seemed happy living alone, and Dave’s comment that Jade’s ‘pa was a clearly loving father. As it turned out, ‘pa severely neglected his own kids after the death of his wife, probably because they reminded him of her. But maybe Jake lost his two children and decided not to make the same mistakes with Jade? That’s why he took her to the island with him instead of siccing her on Roxy again, although Roxy had her own hands full.  Yeah, talking of B1 Roxy, it’s quite interesting to see how she had changed between Hiveswap and Homestuck. Joey saw Roxy in a very different light to Rose; she saw Roxy as very kid-like and sincere, but extremely negligible due to her drinking. Most notable difference is how Roxy here obviously hates cleaning, but by the time she mothers Rose, she takes perfect care of their house. I wonder if this is another effect of Jude and Joey’s theoretical departure from the mansion? If, like Jake, she saw Rose as a sort of second chance? It’s a shame how that turned out.  Yknow, im gonna laugh and cry if it turned out Jude or Joey killed Ana Claire with guns as a baby, like Jade and Jake before them

As for Alternia it was chocablocked with references to Homestuck, from the hierarchy to the Condesce to Doc Scratch to FLARP. Yeah, this is when Hiveswap went from an adventure game to a Homestuck game. I haven’t got much else to say here other than that I’m excited to see how Alternia differs from our impressions of it, and how the infrastructure of the peter pan society works.

and, of course, it had the best possible refrance:

CONCLUSION: Hiveswap has shown its guts to the world, and made a positive impression. I’m disappointed by how short it is, but that’s only because I want more. 

Idk what’s going on with all the bugs such as the resolution glitch or the cutscene processing, especially cos Hiveswap went through an extra 9 months of “bug testing”.... wouldnt most people have gotten this bug the first time they launched the game??? wouldnt they have noticed the cutscene fuckery?  these glitches have resulted in  many people getting refunds. the only reason i didnt do the same is because i want to support this game, and i want to play it again in the future when the bugs are fixed or i have better hardware.

hopefully hiveswap act 2 won’t be followed around by the same issues, same lack of communication, same lengthy development that act 1 has suffered. if it comes swiftly, and if hiveswap act 2 makes as good an impression as act 1, then I feel we’ll have something truly special on our hands. 

Story and characters: 4 hats outta 5 - short but sweet

Gameplay: 2.5 hats outta 5 - glitchy and contentless with no fail state, but this isnt necessarily a bad thing Humor : 4 hats outta 5 - sometimes missed the mark but a great chuckle for any player, fan or noob Graphics: 5 hats outta 5 - e c s t a s y Music: 4 hats outta 5 - does the job, does it well Dedication to source material: 4 hats outta 5 - best of the old, best of the new. 

FINAL SCORE: 8/10. All it needs is to finish, then it’s already better than Homestuck... 

[ectoflowermaid]

Homestuck Camping Headcanons

John: Brought enough kites to populate a small country if the citizens were also kites. “John we’re in the middle of the fucking woods where are you going to fly a goddamn kite,” wrong question Karkat. John makes eye contact while holding a kite, floats up above the tree line, and flies his kite suck a dick everyone. Terezi tries flying one of the kites but seemingly does not know how. When John tries to show her she somehow manages to get him tangled up in the string and just starts cackling. She takes another kite from the pile and flies it perfectly. John is not pleased.

Dave: Spends the entire trip there composing raps and sick beats which is VERY ANNOYING to Karkat who is being carried five inches from Dave’s stupid rhyming mouth fuck you Dave. When they get there, it turns out mr cool kid is hella afraid of bugs, like “fuck oh fuck there’s a bug Karkat kill it please fuck oh my god someone please just kill it” levels of hate. “You know my species starts out as a bug” Karkat narrows his eyes. That is different, Dave tells him, your species can talk and have s- “eat shit, Dave.” Around the campfire, he tries to tell a scary story but it turns out the big plot twist at the end is just a character falling down some stairs and Dave saying “I warned you about stairs, bro” in a spooky voice. Roxy throws a marshmallow at his head from across the campfire.

Jade: Somehow manages to befriend every single forest creature she finds. She goes out for a walk and comes back with five squirrels, three bunnies, and a doe with her baby in tow. “Can we keep them?” She finds a nearby lake with a little waterfall and encourages everyone to go swimming, she cannonballs off the ledge obvi and a belly flop competition starts. Everyone’s belly hurts. This was a mistake. Oh god.

Rose: Finds a dark cave nearby and extends an invitation to explore it, Kanaya lights the way and Jake shows up in full on spelunking gear which ends up being pretty much useless as the cave dead ends after fifty feet. Rose is disappointed, she was hoping to find ancient cave drawings or the remains of a ritual sacrifice. Jake, who found some cool rocks and some kind of skull he might give to Dave, asks her why she seems let down. When she mumbles something about the blood of children he nods and walks a step behind her on the way back. At the campfire, Rose also tries to tell a scary story, she recounts the tale of Mothman. It is actually pretty spooky until she gets to the end and says that there probably was no Mothman and it was most likely a red sand hill crane that had wandered off its mighration course. Dave boos.

Kanaya: No one but Rose will share a tent with Kanaya (especially not Dave) because she likes to turn up her glow a little which attracts every. Single. Bug. She has an entourage of moths following her around and yes they do have names, Rose, they’re our children now you have to love them. Tries her hand at scary stories too, but it ends up just being about a troll who showed up to a white-tie occasion in a semi-formal outfit. Needless to say, the fear and outraged reaction was limited. She does end up scaring John, however. He heads around to the latrine only to see Kanaya hunched over a bag of pre-packed blood. “Uh, Kanaya? What are you doing?” She turns around with blood all over her mouth which she casually wipes away, Oh Hello John, I Did Not Hear You Coming, Is Something The Matter? The last part is said to his back as he sprints away screaming.

Karkat: Eats a bug in front of Dave just to freak him out a little, then Dave asks if it’s cannibalism and Karkat punches him in the arm. Tries to refuse swimming in the lake, but Dave jumps in and pretends to drown so Karkat freaks out and jumps in to try to rescue him. When Dave resurfaces laughing, Karkat pushes him back under and asks Dirk if this would count as a just death. Dirk says he better not risk it. While he’s asleep, Dave and John team up by squirting shaving cream on Karkat’s hand and tickling his face with a crow feather. This backfires because instead of rubbing his own face, Karkat starts swinging his arms out and manages to cover both Dave and John’s faces in shaving cream. He doesn’t notice and goes immediately back to sleep. Dave and John wash the shaving cream off and agree that this never happened, only Jane and Roxy Definitely Saw Them and also took a video.

Terezi: “accidentally” knocks one of John’s tent poles out with her cane while she’s walking, then accuses John of unfairly targeted a poor innocent blind girl. She and Vriska go to the river to try and catch fish for dinner, they end up getting in a competition to see who can catch the most fish. Everyone eats soup for dinner. Terezi and Vriska will not talk about what happened. Terezi gives scary stories a go, but it ends up being less scary and more like one of her roleplaying court scenarios. The only vaguely frightening thing is that at the end, she points up to the trees and everyone suddenly realizes that she hanged a bunch of her plushies sometime during the day and apparently no one noticed until now. She smiles wickedly and everyone feels slightly uneasy.

Jane: Spends part of the afternoon getting the soup ready in anticipation of a lack of fish. Realizes she forgot some of her spices at home and starts panicking until Jade takes her through the woods and helps her find some wild herbs that will taste almost the same. At one point, she goes to the bathroom and comes back with a small carapacian in handcuffs having apparently dodged another assassination attempt. She treats this very casually but enjoys being fussed over for a little bit. She tells a scary story that’s actually scary, no one realizes she’s teamed up with John in the Ultimate Prankster Duo. He is making the wind move through the trees very eerily, and right at the scariest part of the story he jumps out of the woods yelling. Everyone jumps out of their seats, some of the godtier kids accidentally fly up a good ten feet in the air they got so frightened. Jane and John high five and secretly salute Colonel Sassacre.

Jake: Jumps off the waterfall at least fifty times and has a blast doing it. Dirk is hesitant to go because he secretly is sort of afraid of heights after living in the post-apocalyptic high rises of Texas. Jake remedies this by picking him up bridal style and jumping off the ledge with him. Dirk does NOT scream or hold onto Jake for dear life because that would be uncool. Jake shows Jade some of the cool rocks he found and presents Dave with the cool skull he brought back. Dave is slightly in awe and develops a newfound respect for Jake, who promises to show him his Cool Skull collection when they get back home. Jake tells a story around the campfire that might have been intended to be scary, but ends up being more of an adventure tale, Indiana Jones style. Everyone listens intently and really enjoys it even though it’s not a ghost story.

Roxy: Can apparently climb trees like nobodies business? She had to help the carapacians in her old neighborhood get stuff out of them because they were always losing balls and cats and kites. She goes for a walk with Jade and Calliope while Jane is making dinner and they pick her a nice bouquet of wildflowers to give her when they get back. Around the campfire, she tries to tell a scary story but it ends up being about wizards and no one is surprised. Their tent is poppin’ and she and the ladies party it the fuck up all night and end up sleeping until noon the next day because they’re so exhausted.

Calliope: Loves being in nature so so so so much holy fuck. She’s lived underground and chained up her entire life that this is unbelievable. She’ll spend entire hours just staring up at the sky and pointing out cloud shapes to Jane and Roxy. She tries telling a scary story around the campfire, but it ends up being a tale about the importance of friendship and how love is the truest magic of all. There are a few tears in some of the kids eyes at the end of it.

Dirk: He and Jake go out to collect firewood and refuse to take more than one trip so they stagger back into camp with towering piles of branches and make a huge mess by dropping them everywhere. Instead of telling a ghost story, he and Dave have a rap battle over the fire which devolves into them just laughing and quoting SBAHJ until they can’t talk anymore. Karkat and Jake share a Look™ like, I can’t believe these are our fucking dorks. Dirk can name every single star, he knows the stars and constellations that transferred over from his Earth, and he knows the ones that migrated in from Alternia/Beforus. People begin to doubt him when he points out a constellation that he claims is shaped like a dick, most likely because he called it “Ursa Penis”. He spends the rest of the night trying to come up with a major/minor dick size joke but can’t think of a good one and sulks a little about it.

Sollux: Sets up everyone’s tent for them with his psiionics and goes on a walk with Karkat. They get very lost and argue the whole time about whether or not they are actually lost. John and Dave are flying above them and could theoretically help them get back to camp but they will not. Sollux thinks they’re going to die out in the woods and tries eating some roots and berries and mushrooms even though Karkat tells him that that’s the worst possible fucking idea he’s ever had in his life and yes he’s including the time Sollux suggested finding a way to combine troll and bee DNA to make the ultimate being. You mean ‘bee’-ing, Sollux says. No the fuck I do not, Karkat replies. The mushroom Sollux eats ends up giving him wackass hallucinations and Karkat definitely does not record any of the crazy bullshit Sollux starts saying.

[ambiencespectrum]

Rococo Kids

Fandom: Homestuck. Pairing: Dave Strider <> Rose Lalonde. Words: 5,060. Additional Tags: One Shot, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Hurt/Comfort. Cuddling & Snuggling. Trigger Warnings: temporary character death, suicide attempt, past child abuse.

AO3 version.

A/N: i haven’t written for these two in ages, let alone ever actually posted on tumblr for them. guess it’s time to try it.

He finds her floating there, suspended and pale. The full-length lavender dress she’s wearing is drifting like smoke around her form, loose as the pale hair haloing her head. The black of her lips stand out stark against her ivory skin, smudged on the left side like a bleeding ink stain.

Like this, Dave unwillingly thinks of how some people would describe his sister as unearthly and beautiful. Mostly, he just thinks this is sad.

“Dammnit, Rose,” He mutters, and lets his sneaker skim the surface of the pool. The one Rose has drowned herself in. “We talked about this shit.”

She remains as still and lifeless as she has for the past five minutes- exactly that, as Dave has that thought- and he sighs. Sometimes Rose has the sense to let resurrection do its thing and get back up on her own, and sometimes it’s like this.

Rose floats along the aqua green bottom of her pool, encased in water that is clearer than glass. The only disturbance of the surface comes from Dave’s brief toeing of it, adding to that impression.

Dave kinda really hates looking at her like this, even if he gets it. Kanaya is away with Karkat and won't be back for at least another few days; special moirail retreat from the public eye. Like Rose clearly has, Dave has also been getting away with things while his partner is absent. He only came by to see Rose because... he's not sure. Maybe because he wanted her to talk him out of stuff, or maybe because he somehow sensed he needed to talk her out of stuff.

Looks like he's too late to, fuck.

He captchalogues his sneakers, socks, and hoodie, and lets himself fall out of the air above the water. The pool is practically frigid as he splashes into it, and Dave is even less impressed with how his night is going. He swims downwards in long strokes, descending towards his sister. His aviators stay on his face probably from sheer force of will.

Rose is limp and colder than ice as he grabs her; the dress’s long folds tangling them both as Dave kicks around for a moment, remembers he can just fly them out, and does so. Pulling her out of the water takes away the effect of weightlessness, and Rose nearly drags him off balance as her stupidly heavy dress acts like deadweight.

Not that Rose isn’t literal deadweight, hanging in his arms like giant stiff porcelain doll. It’s only a little less disturbing than it could be, since this isn’t the first time.

Dave’s hair sticks to his sunglasses as he flies them to the edge, water dripping everywhere from them both. He sets his sister down gently on the tiles, sitting back a few feet and waiting for the rebound to start.

Only a Just or Heroic death can kill a god. Rose dunking herself in the nearest waterbody, for whatever reason it is tonight, hardly counts.

Rose jerks a few minutes later- two and twenty-six seconds, she’s resisting only a little now- and gaudy multicolor light covers her body. It’s blinding, and then fades to reveal that life has colored Rose’s cheeks again. Of course, Rose also starts choking on the residual water in her throat.

Dave rolls Rose on her side as she coughs violently, rubbing her bare back as she spits chlorine filled water onto the pool deck. The backless dress remains wet despite the resurrection because God Tier shit only extends to their game clothes. This is probably a lovely number Kanaya made for her wife, and while Dave knows shit all about fabrics, he thinks his sister has ruined it thoroughly.

Rose shivers and keeps taking gasping breaths, recovering from being dead for- Dave checks the history around Rose, and finds she’s been down for five hours and twelve minutes.

And she didn’t even text him before she did it. That hurts in a weird, uncomfortable way, and Dave doesn’t appreciate the feeling.

He’s mad at her, because they promised each other, but he’s also got no leg to stand on right now.

So Dave doesn’t point out that Rose broke their promise. He just slides an arm under her side as she settles from the coughing fit and helps her to sit up. Her dress sticks to her everywhere, revealing quite clearly Rose Lalonde, co-queen of a kingdom, goddess of insight and luck and light, saw fit to discard her bra tonight and wear a dress that goes sheer when wet.

Dave knows more than he’d like to know about Rose’s body, considering the years between them, and the years they spent on the meteor, so only the faint impression of old earth’s oh shit boobsattitude lingers. This is nothing compared to other shit they got up to as young and depressed teenagers. He just brushes the lank white hair out of Rose’s face and focuses on her strikingly purple eyes.

“You’re lucky some poor chess guy didn’t find you,” Dave informs Rose. “Would’ve given them trauma induced nightmares for the rest of their life, finding their god queen biting the big one in her own pool.”

“Which is why we got rid of the staff months ago, you know that,” She informs him right back, twice as hoarse in voice. She’s haughty in tone, but that’s just her default state. It would be more worrisome if she were to apologize.

Dave pulls his soaked t-shirt away from his chest, grimacing as it peels off his skin. Rose doesn’t even bother with her own clothes, just drawing her legs to herself and wrapping her arms around them. They sit in their joint puddle of unhappy feelings for a while, letting the chill creep into their bones until it’s more unbearable than the silence.

“You look like shit,” Dave comments eventually. Rose is back to full health, no longer corpse colored, but she still looks like something… drowned. Yeah.

“In the sanctity of my own home, I would think I am permitted to be less than stunning,” Rose replies derisively. “The double standards for gender roles were left behind three universes ago, Dave. A woman is allowed to look like shit rather than the epitome of beauty whenever she pleases.”

Dave tilts his head down, lips a thin line. “Wear a wet dress and ditch the undergarments if you want, but I’m pretty sure suicide is still illegal, Rose.”

Rose sniffs. “We’re gods, Dave. We can’t die unless we meet the qualifications of a nonsensical and interpretive set of rules.”

“You’re heart wasn’t beating for over five fucking hours,” Dave says, somewhat harshly. Rose goes quiet. “I’m not trained in any kind of medical expertise, but shit, Rose. That’s pretty dead.”

His hands twitch in his lap and Dave curls them into fists to avoid shaking. It gets easier but it doesn’t, handling someone being dead. Handling Rose being dead. Dave’s eyes sting dryly and he resists the urge to rub them. He’s too tired for this shit.

Rose runs a hand through her hair, dragging it backwards into a messy slick. It leaves her face exposed and reveals her long lashes, which stand out under the light from above them as she blinks once, twice. She shuts her eyes, sighing.

“I have no excuse,” She says softly, after a long beat. Dave grunts.

“What was it this time?” He asks.

“Kanaya is turning forty- ah, no. Nineteen sweeps. She’ll be nineteen sweeps this year,” Rose says, and looks so tired as she does. “I scarcely look eleven.”

Dave does a few calculations in his head- Rose tries hard to use Alternian chronology for Kanaya, but Dave is a little stuck on human earth calendars, given his powers and all- and comes up with forty and some months for Kanaya, and twenty-five for Rose.

“Midlife crisis, then,” Dave summarizes. Rose titters tightly.

“If only it were that.”

He shrugs. “Not like we’re in different boats here.”

Rose slides a violet iris to him, and reaches across the short space between them. With her thin little fingers, Rose slides his sunglasses off. Only she and Karkat are allowed to do that, and it’s only because of that fact he lets her.

Rose hooks his glasses on his shirt collar, lifting her hand back up to delicately trace the black circles under his eyes.

“And you deal with it in such a comparably stellar manner,” She responds finally, cupping his cheek and examining the sallowness Dave knows is in his cheeks. “How long has it been?”

Dave doesn’t answer.

“Dave.” Rose’s eyes glint. “How long.”

He relents. “One hundred and fifty-two hours, thirty-nine minutes, four seconds and counting.” Gods can go longer than the average schmuck before hallucinating, and even longer before they die.

Rose frowns at him, and her eyes show how much the number hurts her. She rubs his cheek with her thumb, biting her smudged black lips. “You didn’t tell me you stopped sleeping again.”

“You didn’t tell me you were looking to literally drown your sorrows, either,” Dave shoots back, and dislikes it when Rose’s hand drops from his face. He misses its presence, even if he’s a knot of frustration and hurt right now.

“Communication, for all our lengthy conversations, was never our strong point, was it?” Rose observes softly. She curls around herself again, looking at anything other than Dave.

“Nah,” Dave says, dropping his eyes to his soaking jeans. “Kind of a shitty irony.”

Rose doesn’t respond, and they sit like the emotionally stunted, uncommunicable assholes they are in the puddle of misery they made themselves. They’re supposed to support each other, look after one another and make sure they don’t do stupid self-destructive shit like this. Some moirails they are.

“We’re fucking awful at this,” Dave mutters, tired in a lot of ways he’d rather not be.

“An apt assessment,” Rose agrees. He hears the nearly hidden regret in her words, because even now they’re cagey about how they feel when they’re upset. Especially when they’re caught in a downward spiral of self-loathing.

Actions are a little easier, though. Like reaching out and pulling on the hem of Rose’s dress, silently asking. Her hand slips around Dave’s almost immediately, their fingers sliding together and holding tight.

A moment later, and Dave and Rose are winding around each other in a wet, desperate hug. He puts his face in her damp shoulder, smelling pool and his sister’s skin. Against his ear he feels her pulse, hears the air going in and out of her throat, and hugs her tighter to press the sensations into himself.

She’s alive, she’s alive and neither of them can die. Neither of them can die and as much as that terrifies them sometimes, it’s a god damn blessing here and now.

They can’t die, but without Rose Dave knows he’d find a way. She’s told him she’d do the same if it were reversed.

Rose’s sharp nails dig into his back as she holds onto him, a shuddery breath moving through her thin body and coming out hoarse. Dave’s eyes aren’t just stinging from lack of sleep anymore, and they’re considerably wetter as Rose makes a quiet little sound by his ear. Something close to a cry, but too short and dainty to be.

Sometimes she sobs for hours, sometimes he does. Tonight they just hold onto each other and blink tears away until they can breathe right again. It’s not so bad they breakdown completely, or maybe it’s so bad they’ve relapsed too far into old habits to do so. Dave can’t tell.

He doesn’t really care.

They’re both shivering, chilled by the air and by the mass of self-inflicted feelings inside themselves. It’s a lot less cold with Rose halfway into his lap and keeping her arms locked around his shoulders.

Dave rubs one hand up and down her back, feeling the bumps of her spine and ribs. He feels her hands find one scar he’s got on the back of his neck, a particularly nasty one from a strife when he tried turning his back on Bro to run away- her fingers run along it, icy to the touch, and different enough from the agony of steel and hot blood that Dave barely thinks on the memory longer than a second.

“I told you why I fell off the wagon, Dave,” Rose says in a hushed voice, leaving the scar be and moving to tangle her fingers in his wet hair. “Tell me why you did.”

Dave shrugs, keeping his world dark as he hides in his sister’s neck. “Nothing really. Dumb shit.” She waits, massaging his scalp, and Dave continues after he wrangles his own feelings into submission again. “It’s his birthday next month.”

Rose hums; the sound warm and full in Dave’s ear. She doesn’t ask who the person is, because she knows. “And?”

“And I made a dumb mistake by getting lost in my head,” Dave continues. He can usually handle the weird hang up he has on Bro’s birthday- they never even did much for it, it makes no sense- but he fucked up this year. “Ended up wandering around the city, headphones on and everything- and I just, forgot to pay attention to where I was headed. There’s too many parks in trolltopia, you know? I can’t tell them all apart even when I’m on the ball, and fuck if I know west from east when I’m full on dissociating.”

Rose keeps massaging his scalp, patient.

“Strife hobbyist group,” Dave finally explains, voice dropping low despite his attempts to keep it level. “There were swords involved. I wasn’t even all that near, Jesus, but I just- got stuck, and it’s fucking stupid but I couldn’t move until they stopped strifing and noticed their local godly ruler was having a stroll right by their weekend sparring field.” He swallows around the lump in his throat. They might look young but he’s a grown man. He hates being unable to handle this, even now. “Should’ve just walked away instead of staring into space like a braindead tool.”

“And I should have confided in you that I was being drawn back into a spiral of fear and self-loathing again,” Rose comforts. She presses her lips to his neck, sighing through her nose. It’s warmer than either of them are. “We both made some bad judgements as of late.”

Dave draws back, partly reluctant to. Rose watches him through her lashes, and like always, it feels like she’s seeing way deeper than most people ever will into him. Dave kinda wonders why it feels like that, when really, there’s not that much depth to him at all.

People (Rose, Karkat) tell him otherwise. He still doesn’t quite believe them.

Dave looks over his sister, who is pale as ever and resembles strongly a white cat dunked in water. Almost too thin everywhere she isn’t gently curvy, and built out of somewhat vicious tendencies, meticulously kept aloofness, and an impulsive streak ten miles long.

She’s beautiful, even if she’s as much a mess as Dave is.

Because they’re alone and it feels right, he leans close again and presses his lips to her forehead; then tilting his chin down and putting their heads together. Her eyes are close enough they blur into whites and purples, and Dave counts the nearly invisible freckles under them.

“I think we need to actually read one of those handbooks Karkat gave us,” Dave says wryly. His partner used to unsubtly leave moirallegiance handbooks out everywhere when he and Rose first started figuring this out. Dave never actually read one, since he’d thought it can’t be that different from just being friends/estranged siblings, right?

“I already have,” Rose says, because of course she has. “I can’t say I’ve been all that good about following the advisory tips, unfortunately.”

“I live with the guy who’s favorite hobby is dissecting romcom relationship dynamics. Loudly. I thought I could get by with just osmosis.”

“Perhaps relationship counselling?” She suggest.

Dave makes a please no noise, grimacing deeply. Rose huffs. “I take that as a no.” She pauses, and then says softly, “Dave, I’m sorry.”

“Oh shit, a sincere and straightforward apology from Rose Lalonde? I think the world’s ending again,” Dave doesn’t flinch when Rose draws away from him to give a flat stare, but he does feel a little bad for interrupting. “Sorry, go on.”

She shakes her head, rolling her eyes. “I attempt to apologize like a civil, non-complex afflicted individual, and you mock me for it. My therapist will be in tears of frustration at my lost progress.”

“The day you actually set foot in a real therapist’s office will be the day you give up overanalyzing every Freudian slip our friends make. And you have so much fun with John’s dickups. I mean slipups.”

Rose smiles faintly. “No you don’t.”

“Nah, definitely do not,” Dave smiles back. “But seriously, say what you need to. I, uh, I’ll keep things mature until you’re done.”

Rose’s shoulders rise, and then fall. She still looks tired, if less suicidal. “I’m sorry, Dave. We both may have been keeping our rough patches from one another, but I am the one who took the most direct action of self-destruction.”

Dave quirks an eyebrow. “It’s not like I wouldn’t have dropped in a few more days.”

“There’s a difference between keeping yourself awake until sheer exhaustion knocks you out, and holding yourself underwater until you drown.”

“Not much. Exhaustion kills you when it gets to a point.”

“A watery asphyxiation by my own hand is still more severe than that.”

“So’s drugging yourself with enough energy shots to give your heart an arrhythmia.”

Rose purses her lips. “Let’s agree to disagree. Competitive comparisons of mental health failings helps no one. Anyway,” She says before Dave can butt in. “I offer you my apology for what I did, whether you accept it or not.”

Dave doesn’t hesitate in his response. “Course I do, Lalonde. But you gotta listen to mine, too, if you’re going to get all pale like that.” He smirks at her. Rose gives him an exasperated look. “I’m sorry, too. We literally had an in writing accord that when we get bad, we fucking talk to each other about it. I spent way too long an afternoon on that thing with you to ignore its existence now. We both broke it, not just you. So… I’m sorry.”

“You’re forgiven,” Rose replies, taking his hands into hers as he reaches for them. His are a little bigger, now that puberty is long done, and they’ve got scars in a hundred different spots hers don’t. But they’re still close enough in resemblance he sees their relation.

It’s a comfort, to know that however badly they fuck themselves up, lie and keep secrets from each other- genetics ensures they’ve got a connection that won’t break by any means.

Maybe they can’t die, and will have to watch the people they love age in ways they won’t- Jane and Dave together can rewind their ages, regenerate youth, but it’s just not the same as being a God Tier- but at least through all that, they’ll have each other no matter how long time stretches on.

Dave feels he’s still riding the unfortunate bump of fresh trauma from earlier, the way his thoughts keep getting mushy with his consent. It’s not something that really bothers him in the moment, wrapping himself back around Rose and sinking into the mutual apology and acceptance. Alone on the pool deck together, they sit and just mend themselves in the presence of their twin, not talking for a length of time.

  “Kanaya will be so disappointed,” Rose mourns, once they try to stand again. Her dress still sticks to her in places, and otherwise hangs heavy everywhere else. “I think this was a birthday gift.”

“You’re such a drama queen,” Dave snorts. “You can’t just toss yourself in the drink and be done with it. Nah, you need to be a twelve out of ten and ready for the president’s cocktail party before you’re fit to drink your poison.”

“Last I checked, we have no presidents to speak of anymore.”

“Eh, old world government tiers still work if it’s in the presence of in-the-know individuals.”

“Hispter.”

“Cauldron calling the kettle black. Don’t think your Sappho collection ever got forgotten.”

Rose sniffs. “Classic lesbian literature is quite different from an outdated patriarchy based power system, thank you.”

“Fair, but you’re a hipster in your own ways, Rose.”

She doesn’t respond beyond a dismissive hum. They’ve had this conversation nine times already and it’s gone in loops for hours if they let it. Best to wait until they’re dry to start it up properly.

Rose leaves the ground, stepping into thin air and flying out across the pool towards the exit. Dave follows slowly, and watches as her dress trails against the water. The ripples they leave disturb the mirror perfect surface a third time since he found her.

Dave hooks an arm around Rose’s waist, and she returns the gesture. He banishes the memory of her lifeless body under that rippling surface, even though he knows it’ll come back to haunt him at least a few times before this can be processed completely.

Because carapaciens have only one mode when it comes to their gods- undying adoration is the least extravagant way to say it- the veritable mansion Rose and Kanaya ended up in is barely not a castle. The swimming pool on the middle level isn’t even the most lavish thing.

They pass by the bigger rooms, headed for the one they always use when it’s been a Night for them. It’s on the eastern side, where the sun will rise tomorrow and shine through the curtains to burn their sleep deprived retinas out of their skulls and force them into the land of the living. A full-proof plan that usually works if one of them doesn’t shut the curtains and pull the other back under the thick comforter.

There’s an ensuite bathroom attached to the wide bedroom, big enough that it makes the tiny closet washroom in Dave’s old Houston apartment look even smaller than it had been. The whole set up might just be larger than that old place; thick carpets and actual drapes and furniture that’s fit for royalty. Dave drops onto the first loveseat he passes, dampening the rich purple fabric with his soaked clothes.

Rose bends briefly near him, turning her back and gesturing vaguely at the straps holding her dress up. Dave obliges her and unhooks the clips. As she stands and walks away, he decaptchalogues his phone to start mindlessly scrolling social media while she takes first shower. He doesn’t even glance over as she drops her dress at the door, walking into the bathroom and shutting the door behind her.

When Rose emerges again, wrapped in a wide and thick towel, she looks better all around. Dave stands and takes his turn, dropping a kiss to her temple as they pass each other and then dropping his itchy, half dried clothes on top of Rose’s. He shuts the door as she starts getting changed in the bedroom, and walks right into the still running shower. It’s hot enough it burns a little, chasing the chill out of his system.

Dave shuts it off when he no longer feels the itch of dried chlorine on his skin. There are still plenty of big warm towels for him on the rack, and he wraps one around his waist. Another smaller one goes around his head, just for the hell of it.

Rose is on the bed already when he walks out; dressed in a baggy old t-shirt proclaiming Foxy Grandpa she probably alchemized years ago, and soft pajama pants. Her hair is still a mess, and her black lipstick has been wiped clean. She’s brought out her laptop and is probably scrolling through whatever her video library has to offer.

Rose slides her eyes from the screen to Dave’s face, and she gives a faint smile. He decaptchalogues his own pajamas into his arms, smiling back at her before he starts changing. They’ve been around the Harley-Englishs way too long to be bothered by nudity, let alone each other’s. The tenth time Dave wandered into Jade’s personal garden and she was sans shirt under the hot sun, he’d gotten over it. Mostly.

It’s different with Rose, versus Jade who is twice their size in a lot of ways and not his sister. It’s mostly like glancing at a reflection of himself, really. Just with slightly different parts and heights.

Dave slides onto the cloudlike mattress once his undershirt and shorts are on, scooting to the middle of the bed where Rose is. With a mountain of pillows propping them up, they settle into the position they want to have tonight.

Dave opts to put his head on her chest, listening to the steady tempo of her heart for definitely trauma related reasons. Rose’s cheek rests on the top of his skull, arm under his neck and holding him close. Their legs end up tangling together as they rest their hipbones against one another; sharing residual warmth of their showers. Rose sets the laptop to the side Dave isn’t on, screen angled so they can both see as she presses play.

Her hand paps his cheek only once, and he returns the favor. It’s mostly just a formal recognition thing for them, rather than the soppy calm-down switch like it is for trolls. Cuddling like octopi works just fine on its own for their informal piling.

“Can’t believe troll Jaden Smith got an anime before I did,” Dave mumbles as the pastel opening credits begin. It’s considered a classic now days, and Dave feels weirdly old since he remembers when it first came out. “Still haven’t gotten one either, damn. I need to get on that shit.”

“What genre will you be classifying it as?” Rose asks, tangling her fingers in his hair for the umpteenth time.

“Maybe sci-fi or something, but I’m also still leaning towards maid café.”

“And the story?”

“Underground government revolution, duh.”

“Excellent choice, brother dear. Keeping to what our family knows best, are we?”

“Roxy and Dirk are too good a material source to waste.”

“As is our alternate selves’s history as resistors.”

“Obviously.”

They run through the first half of the episode before Dave starts to really wind down. He’s gone days without sleep, out of some kind of fear/self-punishment reasoning, and he’s beyond absolutely exhausted despite his pretending to be otherwise. Rose’s nails are gentle against his scalp and her body warmly pressed to his, so Dave’s mind is relaxing out of its sleep resistant anxiety without his prompt. Even if he has nightmares- and inevitably he will- Dave will wake up right next to his sister and moirail. He’s safe.

If he wakes up thrashing, fighting against spectres of his past or trying to rescue his drowning sister, Rose will just hold his face and make him focus on her, on the present. She’s the god of clarity in a manner of speaking; she’s the only one who can snap him out of an attack besides Karkat. And not just because of her powers.

If and when Dave will wake up, surfacing from a nightmare that sends his heart beating painfully fast in his chest and leaves him breathless, she’ll be right there to talk him down, kiss his temples and cheeks and keep holding him until the shakes fade. And if and when Rose wakes up like that, stifling cries about what she’s lost and may yet lose, shivering from images of things that’ve been in her head and the way her wife’s eyes gain wrinkles as years past- Dave will take a turn holding her close until she breathes evenly again, regaining sense of where she is and who she’s with. He’ll look her in the eye and make her look back, cupping her cheek gently and pressing his lips to her forehead, and they’ll tangle themselves up until everything passes and its morning again.

They’re not picture perfect moirails, but they’re there for each other as much as they can be. It works majority of the time, and they make up for it later when they falter. And that’s good enough.

Dave sinks into the heavy exhaustion inside him, not quite as afraid any longer while he’s wrapped around Rose. She cuddles him as close as he does her, and Dave drifts off to the sound of her breathing.

When morning- afternoon, nearly- rolls around, they’ve only woken each other once in the night, and Dave feels considerably less like he’s dying slowly. Rose, in turn, seems considerably less like she really did die the night prior.

Before they haul themselves upright again, to check in with their friends and partners and put real food into their stomachs, they lie around in the enormous and soft bed. Talking quietly and touching intimately, just enjoying the calmness that comes from being together and around no one else. They’ve become better practiced over the years, opening up around their friends and loved ones- but it’s still hard, and sometimes they can only manage it with each other.

It’s good, just lying together and talking in circles. It’s what they should do more often, so weeks and nights they’ve been having don’t happen.

When they do sit up from the covers and pillows, Dave watches his sister pull open fully the heavy drapes, pushing outwards the panes and letting the afternoon sun inside. It illuminates the pale white of her everything, and makes her shine gold.

Standing in the open sunlight, lavender eyed and glowing bright, Dave finds again he will always strongly prefer her like this. Sleep rumpled and sunlit as the open window blows her short hair, rather than elegantly dressed and still like an empty shell against the bottom of a pool.

That preference is an easily guessed one, seeing as the smile Rose turns on him says she knows exactly what he’s thinking of her at the moment.

“We’ll talk next time,” She promises him, and that’s enough for Dave.

[lightrises]

ao3 works tag meme

got tagged for this by @feralphoenix​! i have a grand total of.... 18 works on ao3, and a number of these are collabs. so i’m not sure how revealing this will be? 8′)a but we’ll give it a go

Go to your Works page, expand all the filters, and let us know the following:

1. What are your 1st and 2nd most common ratings? Any surprises?

general audiences (12), then teen and up audiences (6). and nope, that sounds about right for me!

2. What’s your most common warning? Least common? Do you consider yourself an adventurous writer?

no archive warnings apply (14) for most, graphic depictions of violence (1) for least

wrt that last question: ehhhhhh i mean. i guess by my own vague reckoning of “adventurous” i’m not? i tend to stick to my wheelhouse of low-stakes genfic and occasional excursions into romance when i’m just making my own stuff. ntm most of my homestuck stuff was either collabs or sprung from prompts (whereas my undertale works are running at an inverse to that, so: Progress??? shrugs)

i don’t think there’s a right answer here though. if, like, you shift the question from one of content type to “hey i made stuff At All” it’s a different story. writing’s been pretty hard for me over the past few years, so any time i’m able and willing to get stuff done and put it out there, that’s... well, its own version of “adventurous” perhaps! and that doesn’t touch on how personal some of that work has been, maybe not always in obvious ways (as loud as you can make it is one of the more Clearly personal ones imo, aha)

3. How many works have you done in each relationship category? Is this more accidental or do you have preferences?

gen (15), f/m (8), f/f (2), other (2)

“gen” is kinda funny here because i do in fact love genfic A Lot, but a good chunk of mine overlap with the other categories lol.... but that’s what i tend to like best anyway when it comes to shipfic, i.e. with a lot of genfic trappings woven in. if i were more prolific you’d probably see more other and f/f works from me these days, though i’m still very much down for The Good Het too

as for the other relationships category.... haha, man. okay i’ll just, c/p this instead of typing it out:

John Egbert/Rose Lalonde (6)

John Egbert & Rose Lalonde (5)

Chara & Frisk (Undertale) (4)

Chara & Asriel Dreemurr (3)

John Egbert & Jade Harley (2)

Jade Harley & Rose Lalonde (2)

Dad Egbert/Rose's Mom | Beta Roxy Lalonde (1)

Dad Egbert & John Egbert (1)

Poppop Crocker | Alpha John Egbert & Grandma English | Alpha Jade Harley (1)

Grandma English | Alpha Jade Harley/Roxy's Mom | Alpha Rose Lalonde (1)

the only comment i’ll add is that i wish there was more “john & jade” up there!!! but That’s How It Is alas

4. What are your top 4 fandoms by numbers? Are you still active in all of them or do you tend to migrate a lot?

homestuck (12), undertale (6)

undertale’s the only one i’m active in right now, and i’m very much a “choose one (1) fandom and fix most of your attention on it for a few years” type of fan. i do think if i wrote for homestuck again i’d want it to be jaderose. The Witch’s Gambit [image heavy] pops into mind first - it’s a setting i’m still drawn to, so who knows! i’d be nice to revisit it eventually

5. What are your top 4 character tags? Does this match how you feel about the characters or are you puzzled? 

john egbert (10), rose lalonde (9), chara (5), frisk (4)

this is largely VERY fair lmao, though on the homestuck end of things i wish i’d done more with jade (ao3 says it’s 4 works - 5 if you include her cameo in I Can Barely Sleep[...] - and that’s excluding two alpha!jade fics). another note is that for some reason ao3 doesn’t rank asriel, even though he’s in 3 works and it shows both alpha!jade and alpha!john (with 2 apiece)???? Excuse Me

the chara and frisk tags might Possibly meet(exceed??) the john and rose tags in the future, but that depends on how many works i end up making! we’ll have to see how that goes in the long run

6. What are your top 2 most used additional tags, and your bottom 2? What would happen if you combined all 4 into a fic?

autistic frisk (4), illustrated (4), implied/referenced character death (2), additional warnings in author’s note (2)

God...... i guess that would either be frisk on one of the neutral routes or a prequel/follow-up to and if you court this disaster, possibly in comic form?? though tbh any work that features frisk prominently and mentions what happened to chara and/or asriel pre-game would count too

7. How many WIPs do you currently have on ao3? Any you don’t plan on finishing?

3 are listed! one of them - Tripping Toward The Light - has been complete for awhile now, at its original tumblr home; the ao3 mirror is just something we haven’t gotten around to finishing yet. 8′) “and i can’t remember the man, the panhandler or his melody” is Super old at this point and likely won’t be picked up again (rip....). what the right hand does has seemed dormant for a while, but i’ve been hacking away at the next chapter on and off and a) i finally see the light at the end of the editing tunnel for chapter 2, and b) unless something drastic happens it’s gonna be 4 times as long as the first chapter, so!!! Def Not Dead, thankfully

8. Tag 5 people!

ummm ok let’s see.. @threeley, @tehstripe, @ruination-fangs, @longroadstonowhere aaaand.... whoever else is down for it??? if you wanna go for it feel free, basically

[blaperile]

Homestuck Epilogues - Meat - Page 10 (Epilogue 2 Page 2)

[cuntboysupreme]

I dare you to answer all of them

Okay but you have to read all of them ;P1: How tall or short do you wish you were?I wish I was taller than I am. I wish I was 5'8" or so. 2: What’s your dream pet? (Real or not)I really like big dogs, but if this is a dream I want a lion.3: Do you have a favorite clothing style?I either dress like I'm a skater dude or like I'm emo, but I like the pastel grunge scene. I just can't afford or pull that off.4: What was your favorite video game growing up?Super Mario Sunshine probably. Or Pikmin. 5: What three things/people do you think of most each day:My boyfriend Logan, my mother, and probably homestuck (please save me from this suffering where everything reminds me of homestuck)6: If you had a warning label, what would yours say?Self-destructive depressed piece of sunshine. Please feed.7: What is your opinion on [insert person/thing here]?I can't answer this one without a prompt.8: What is your Greek personality type? [Sanguine, Phlegmatic, Choleric, or Melancholic]I took this test once. I think I was phlegmatic???? Fuck man i don't remember.Update: I just took it real quick I am indeed phlegmatic as fuck. Next is sanguine, shortly after that is melancholic and last is choleric, which i was not much like.9: Are you ticklish?Yes.10: Are you allergic to anything?Pollen??? I guess??11: What’s your sexuality?Pansexual, but I find myself leaning towards masculine people because I'm trash 12: Do you prefer tea, coffee, or cocoa?cocoa13: Are you a cat or dog person?Yes. People would say I'm a dog person, but I love cats too.14: Would you rather be a vampire, elf, or merperson?Merperson.15: Do you have a favorite Youtuber?Not really16: How tall are you?5'6"17: If you had to change your name, what would you change it to?lol, I've already changed my name and it's Zu18: How much do you weigh? [Only ask this if you know the user doesn’t mind!]shrug probably like 190?19: Do you believe in ghosts/spirits?Sure why not20: Do you like space or the ocean more?the ocean scares me so space21: Are you religious?Kind of. I was raised Jewish, but my beliefs are more agnostic.22: Pet peeves?Chewing loudly, dishonesty, putting a mess in my space, being manipulative.23: Would you rather be nocturnal or diurnal [opposite of nocturnal]?I am nocturnal so the other one24: Favorite constellation?I'm pretty sure??? there's like these two bears in the sky??? and like one is a mom?? and the other is a baby bear??? yeah that one25: Favorite star?My boyfriend Logan, the brightest thing in my life26: Do you like ball-jointed dolls?i do not like dolls because they scare me27: Any phobias or fears?Thunderstorms and being lied to28: Do you think global warming is real?Yes??????29: Do you believe in reincarnation?Sure why not30: Favorite movie?Scott PIlgrim Vs. The World 31: Do you get scared easily?I want to say yes32: How many pets have you own in your lifetime?If fish do not count then 3 and if fish do count then fuck idk33: Blog rate? [You’ll rate the blog of the one who’s asking.]i know that logan sent this but since its anon im not gonna do it heh34: What is a color that calms you?yellow i think35: Where would you like to travel and/or live?Not America36: Where were you born?Detroit, Michigan37: What is your eye color?I would call it hazel but that's not doing it justice38: Introvert or extrovert?introvert39: Do you believe in horoscopes and zodiacs?shrug 40: Hugs or kisses?high fives41: Who is someone you would like to see/visit right now?LOGAN42: Who is someone you love deeply?My mother43: Any piercings you want?Cartilage 44: Do you like tattoos and piercings?Yes45: Do you smoke or have you ever done so?I do not smoke cigarettes46: Talk about your crush, if you have one!My boyfriend is actually the best in the world ever but he lives in Ann Arbor which is closer to where I'm from than where I live now and it makes me sad that he lives so very far away because he is a cutie patootie and i wanna be gay and kiss his face47: What is a sound you really hate?chewing gum loudly48: A sound you really love?Music i guess49: Can you do a backflip?no50: Can you do the splits?yes!51: Favorite actor and/or actress?no52: Favorite movie?I already answered this53: How are you feeling right now?I'm okay. I'm kinda doing this to break while doing my homework.54: What color would you like your hair to be right now?I want it to be pink and purple but i'm not currently in posession of my hair dye55: When did you feel happiest?i have no idea56: Something that calms you down?Music57: Have any mental disorders? [Only ask this if you know the user doesn’t mind!]Depression, anxiety58: What does your URL mean?it was 2 am and i thought it was the funniest thing in the world59: What three words describe you the most?1. trans 2. sad 3. gay60: Do you believe in evolution?science61: What makes you unfollow a blog?posting something i strongly disagree with or something that triggers me62: What makes you follow a blog?they post content i like??63: Favorite kind of person:decent human beings64: Favorite animal(s):big dogs65: Name three of your favorite blogs.1. i 2. don't 3. know66: Favorite emoticon:sparkle heart67: Favorite meme:the dog in the room thats on fire and it says "I'm fine."68: What is your MBTI personality type?INFP69: What is your star sign?Taurus70: Can your dog roll over on command, if you have a dog?YES71: What outfit out of all your clothes do you like to wear the most?Steven universe shirt, dark jeans, beanie, sneakers.72: Post a selfie or two?/tagged/my-face73: Do you have platform shoes?i used to74: What is one random but interesting fact about yourself?i can sing the alphabet backwards75: Can you do a front flip?no76: Do you like birds?sure77: Do you like to swim?i suppose78: Is swimming or ice skating more fun to you?you cannot fall while swimming79: Something you wish didn’t exist:there are many things80: Some thing you wish did exist:time travel81: Piercings you have?both my ears are pierced and my septum is pierced82: Something you really enjoy doing:watching su83: Favorite person to talk to:logan84: What was your first impression of Tumblr?I would go on omegle and people would just send "WHAT IS AIR" and then disconnect85: How many followers do you have?36486: Can you run a mile within ten minutes?no87: Do your socks always match?no88: Can you touch your toes and keep your legs straight completely?yes89: What are your birthstones?emerald90: If you were an animal, which one would you be?probably an otter, but a chubby one91: If a flower could aesthetically represent you, what kind would it be?idk92: A store you hate?shrug93: How many cups of coffee can you drink in one day?i have no idea94: Would you rather be able to fly or read minds?fly. i dont want to hear other peoples thoughts95: Do you like to wear camo?no96: Winter or summer?summer97: How long can you hold your breath for?i have no idea98: Least favorite person?the guy who sexually assaulted me99: Someone you look up to:my mother100: A store you love?belmont army surplus101: Favorite type of shoessneakers102: Where do you live?Chicago103: Are you a vegetarian or vegan? If so, why?no104: What is your favorite mineral or gem?i think sapphires are cool you can get them in any color105: Do you drink milk?a lot106: Do you like bugs?sure107: Do you like spiders?if they arent in my space i dont mine108: Something you get paranoid about?Everything.109: Can you draw:no110: Nosiest question you have ever been asked?any question related to my genitals111: A question you hate being asked?any question related to my genitals112: Ever been bitten by a spider?yes113: Do you like the sound of waves at the beach?yes114: Do you prefer cloudy or sunny days?sunny115: Someone you’d like to kiss or cuddle right now:Logan.116: Favorite cloud type:none117: What color do you wish the sky was?i like it being blue118: Do you have freckles?on my shoulders119: Favorite thing about a person:eyes or voice120: Fruits or vegetables?cucumbers121: Something you want to do right now:see logan122: Is the ocean or sky prettier?depends on where you are and what time it is.123: Sweet or sour foods?sweet124: Bright or dim lights?dim125: Do you believe in a certain magical creature?what is this question asking me126: Something you hate about Tumblr:mobile127: Something you love about Tumblr:mobile128: What do you think about the least?how would i know what it is i think about the least129: What would you want written on your tombstone?"he ded"130: Who would you like to punch in the face right now?no one131: What is something you love but also hate about yourself?being trans132: Do you smile with your teeth showing for pictures?yes133: Computer or TV?computer134: Do you like roller coasters?yes135: Do you get motion sickness or seasickness?no136: Are your ears lobed or attached?attatched. my boyfriend talks about it sometimes. otherwise i would not know137: Do you believe in karma?sure138: On a scale of 1-10, how attractive would you say you are?-25139: What nicknames do you have/have had?Zuzu, zuzu pet, zulander, zeus, zubat, etc140: Did you have any pretend or imaginary friends?probably.141: Have you ever seen a therapist/shrink?yes several142: Would you say you are a good or bad influence to others?i do not think that everything i do is good but i also do not think that my influence on people can be quantified in "good" or "bad" measurements143: Do you prefer giving or receiving gifts/help?giving 144: What makes you angrywhen people do things i asked them not to145: How many languages do you speak fluently?two146: Do you prefer boys, girls, and/or non-binary people?boys147: Are you androgynous?i guess??? sometimes i dont pass but i code myself as male pretty hardcore148: Favorite physical thing about yourself:my hair or my eyes149: Favorite thing about your personality:i like how patient i am150: Name three people you would like to talk to right now in person.1. logan 2. laura jane grace 3. my dog151: If you could go back into time and live in one era, which would you choose?i do not want to live in the past this is the best it has ever been for trans people and it's still horrible.152: Do you like BuzzFeed?Sometimes i like the content they produce153: How did you meet your spouse/girlfriend/boyfriend/partner? [If you have one.]We met through a mutual friend 154: Do you like to kiss others’ foreheads or hands for platonic reasons?i love platonic kisses!155: Do you like to play with others’ hair?yesssssss156: What embarrasses you?when people point out things about myself that i wish they didnt notice157: Something that makes you nervous/anxious:seeing someone i dont like158: Biggest lie you have ever told:"I'm a girl"159: How many people are you following?622160: How many posts do you have on your blog(s)?15,234 on my main161: How many drafts do you have on your blog(s)?0162: How many likes do you have on your blog(s)?20,548163: Last time you cried and why:i dunno and probably because i'm Sad164: Do you have long or short hair?short165: Longest your hair has ever been: to my waist166: Why do you like, dislike, or have neutral feelings about religon?im not getting into this167: Do you really care how the universe and world was created?no i wasnt there and i probably never will be168: Do you like to wear makeup?not really my thing but i think its awesome169: Can you stand on your hands or head for more than thirty seconds?no170: Did you answer the questions you were asked truthfully?yes

[guttermagazine]

Where are all the comic fans?

From three-panel newspaper strips to graphic novels, most of us have encountered a comic in some form at least once in our lives, and yet, it seems that most of us keep relatively quiet about it, especially when compared with how much we discuss other media. Do we just not care that much about comics, or could it be something else?

It’s a given that some people genuinely really just don’t care about comics. At all. Fair enough, but there are hundreds of thousands of comic fans out there – right? Where are they all?

Kevin Drum, political blogger for Mother Jones, estimated that a mere two percent of millennials read comic books in 2014. That’s a shockingly small percentage considering that millennials often get a bad rap for allegedly being lazy, comic book reading, video game playing couch potatoes (although admittedly, I am all of those things. Maybe it’s true).

But his data is flawed. It doesn’t cover the sale of comics online and in used book stores; neither does it take into account the sales of smaller comic publishers. But the data’s true flaw lies in the fact that it reduces reading comics to buying them.

Comics, as with a great many other things, are no longer restricted to the printed form and are available online for free. Creators are able to cut out the middle-man by publishing their work on the Internet using blogs such as Wordpress and Tumblr or sites specifically made with comics in mind such as Tapastic.

Webcomics are incredibly popular. They don’t require you to carry around anything other than a device which can connect to the internet, which you were probably already carrying around, you can blast through them relatively quickly and if you’re reading them on a phone, even in a public place, no-one will ever know.

Most webcomics have a regular update schedule which means you don’t have a wait a month or a year (although this is not always the case… Homestuck, I’m looking at you!) or however long for the next part to be released, and in the time that you are waiting, you can join in with some online discussion, which can be pretty fun and lead to the making of new friendships. Comics on the whole have a pretty broad community, sure, but within that community dwell a multitude of smaller communities dedicated to particular fandoms so it’s easy to find something to talk about or to speculate on what happens next in your favourite comic (beware of spoilers if you’ve not fully caught up yet).

Debatably, one of the most important aspects of webcomics is that they’re easy to share. With the simple click of a button (or, a few buttons, depending on what website or app you’re using… or no buttons, if you’re using a finger …does tapping something on a screen count as pressing a button?) you can share a whole comic with a friend or a whole host of people online. And then, if your pals read it, you’ll probably just talk about it online over whatever platform you used to share it in the first place. And so, perhaps one of the main reasons why we don’t hear people talking about comics so much is because the discussion takes place online.

There are so many places to talk about comics online and they’re easy to find with a simple Google search. In theory, online comic communities provide a safe space for fans to discuss their interest without the fear of being judged, although in reality, it’s not quite so simple. From comic discussion boards such as CBR Community and The Outhousers to comic subreddits, comic elitism is definitely a thing. Beware and possibly reconsider if you’re a casual fan because if you haven’t read every single issue of Batman since its inception, whatever you have to say is probably wrong and oh, boy, you will be made to know it.

But speaking of casual comic fans, so many people read comics and don’t even know it.  Trigger warning: now is the part where I talk about memes but bear with me (if you can stand to) because this is actually relevant.

From their inception in 2008 on 4chan until around 2011 when their popularity started to decline, Rage Comics were all the rage (pun intended. Obviously). If you don’t know what a Rage Comic is, you’ve clearly been living under a rock for quite some time. I recommend not only searching up what Rage Comics are, but also a great many other important and culturally relevant modern things such as dabbing and Harambe. Anyway, now that we’re all on the same page, it seems strange to think of Rage Comics as being comics because first and foremost, they’re a meme. But comics and memes are by no means mutually exclusive.

Rage Comics became so popular that people would talk about them and (rather annoyingly) quote them in real life all the time. Eventually, everyone wanted to make their own, resulting in Rage Comic creators such as Dan Awesome’s Ragemaker Site and the Memebase Ragebuilder.

The prospect of non-artist adults wanting to make comics is incredibly interesting. Children draw comics because they are able to be creative without fear of judgment and they are allowed to be interested in comics and cartoons. Artists make comics because that’s what they do. It’s what they love. It’s what they’ve sent years learning how to do through gritty trial and error; through many sleepless nights and tears. But non-artist adults making comics. That’s new. Was it just because Rage Comics were so popular? Did they just want a slice of the meme pie? Maybe, but more than that, it was because anyone could make them and everyone has a story to tell.

Rage comics are a very crude form of autobio comics. They depict everyday experiences that pretty much everyone can relate to, and by their very nature, mostly look the same, using pre-made templates of characters. All one needs to do to create a Rage comic is to have an idea and use a Rage Comic builder. Pretty easy. It makes you wonder why, if so many people would make comics when it was easy, doesn’t everyone make comics all the time?

Largely because it is deemed acceptable to create and share memes. Not only acceptable, but cool. Everyone wants to be a memelord. But creating comics from scratch, dedicating large portions of your life to drawing cartoons? Nah, that’s for nerds. Screw that. So you could argue that the only real difference between making certain kinds of memes (because it’s not just Rage Comics, basically any meme with more than one image could be reductively defined as a comic) and comics is the amount of effort put into them.

I mean, obviously there’s more to it than that, but it’s a pretty interesting comparison. Without comics, would we have memes? Probably. Nothing can stop the meme train. Even ‘real’ comics have been turned into memes. As an example, Sarah Anderson comics have a huge following and people share them all the time, especially on Facebook, because they’re so relatable. People will think ‘that’s so me!’ and share it. And then they go and read more of them because there are so many of them and they’re all so relatable while being quick to read but also being good time-fillers. But most of the people who read her work probably don’t consider themselves to be comic fans – even though they totally are.

It’s pretty cool that people can read and share comics without even really thinking of them as being comics. It’s thanks to things like this that the stigma of comics as being nerdy (the bad kind of nerdy, not the good kind, by which I mean the fashionista hipster bullshit ‘I’m a nerdy girl’ kind of nerd, if that can even be deemed good at all) is slowly disappearing. But what’s equally as cool is that it basically means that comic fans haven’t disappeared at all. They are everywhere – in disguise.

[homespork-review]

Spork Introduction

CHEL: Hi! I go by Chel, they or she pronouns, and I’m the one spearheading this project. I still like at least a fair percentage of Homestuck, but after the ending disappointed me a great deal, I got bitter, and when Hussie pissed me off further by Godwinning himself, I decided to do something about it. I’m no longer angry about it, but I felt I’d benefit from picking out what I hate from what I love so I can focus on the latter without annoyance getting in the way, and also to benefit my own writing efforts.

BRIGHT: Howdy! I’m Bright, and I got into Homestuck fairly recently. After ploughing through the archive and digesting for a while, I realised that I was thoroughly annoyed by how something enjoyable had fallen apart so comprehensively. I am looking forward to the time-honoured practice of ripping the story apart to identify its weak points and shout at them.

FAILURE ARTIST: Hello, I’m Failure Artist (call me FA for short), she/her/herself pronouns, and I’m so old-school they burned the school down. I was introduced to Homestuck via Something Awful’s Webcomic thread. I checked the old mspadventures.com site and the latest update was [S] John: Bite Apple. After watching that bizarre piece of animation, I had to know what the hell happened before then. I found I enjoyed the wit of the comic though I didn’t really care much about the plot. It was only when Act 5 came around that I became a serious fan. I currently have 122 Homestuck works on Archive of Our Own. I have a lot of free time, you see. I am very disappointed in how Homestuck ended. Possibly there was no completely satisfactory way it could end but it still could have been better. I feel like Hussie was a juggler who threw a lot of balls into the air and ignored them as they fell to the ground and some fans think not catching them was a master move since you’d expect he’d try to catch at least one. Sadly, lots of the problems with the ending are embedded deep within the canon.

TIER: Hi hi. I am Tier, a very late newcomer to the wonderful world of Homestuck (2018 reader!) and average fan overall. I love this webcomic to bits, but the low points are deep and I enjoy seeking out what the heck went wrong. Not particularly analytical myself, hope that's cool!

CHEL: Cool by us! We’ve already done plenty of analysing before we started, as you may realise from my Tumblr’s “homestuck ending hate” tag (at @chelonianmobile).

FAILURE ARTIST: But let’s put that aside for a moment and talk about the good stuff. 

Homestuck is incredibly innovative. It is the first true webcomic. It’s not just a print comic posted online. It uses not just still images and words but also animation, music, and interactive games.

Homestuck is the latest adventure in the series MS Paint Adventures. MS Paint Adventures started as a forum adventure. In forum adventures, the OP acts as a sort of Dungeon Master and other forum members give them prompts. Andrew Hussie’s previous works under MS Paint Adventures were Jailbreak (which is little more than Hussie dicking with the prompters in scatological ways), Bard’s Quest (Choose-your-own-adventure), and the actually-completed Problem Sleuth. Problem Sleuth lacks the music and animation and despite the weird physics shenanigans is a simpler story than Homestuck. The characters aren’t even two dimensional.

Homestuck (and the previous MS Paint Adventures minus Bard’s Quest) are set up like adventure games. Adventure games are where the player is a protagonist in a story and are usually focused on puzzle-solving though sometimes there’s combat. In the beginning, these games were purely text. The player would type what they wanted to do and the game would spout back text describing it - assuming the computer parser understood you.

CHEL: Oh god, I HATED that. I wasn’t around for the heyday but I’ve played a couple and

Pale Luna

was barely an exaggeration (horror warning).

FAILURE ARTIST: As graphics improved, adventure games started using them, but the commands were still in text. Only later was the point-and-click interface created and players didn’t have to guess what exact sentence the computer wanted them to type. Homestuck and the other MS Paint Adventures play with that frustration while paying tribute to the genre. The game within the comic uses RPG elements but the comic itself is set up like those good ol’ adventure games. In the beginning, Homestuck was guided by commands from forum members. Even after he closed the suggestion box, he used memes and fanon created by readers.

CHEL: How good an idea this was varies, as we’ll be showing.

We probably don’t need to describe Homestuck much more. Everyone here who hasn’t read it will doubtless have heard of it. Almost everyone with a Tumblr will have seen fanart, almost anyone at a convention will have seen cosplay. Shoutouts have been made to it in professional works such as the cartoon Steven Universe, and the Avengers fandom latched onto “caw caw motherfuckers” as a catchphrase for Hawkeye to the point that it’s now often forgotten it didn’t originate from there.

FAILURE ARTIST: The Homestuck fandom term “sadstuck” for depressing stories/headcanons somehow leaked into other fandoms. Using second-person is actually cool now and not just for awkward reader fics. Astrology will never be the same again.

CHEL: Now, in the interests of fairness, we will say that when Homestuck is good, it’s amazing, and it’s good often. The characters at least start out appealing and are all immediately distinguishable; even with the typing quirks stripped, it’s easy to tell who said what. The magic system is one of the coolest I’ve ever seen, who doesn’t love classpecting themselves and their faves? Hussie also shows a lot of talent for the complex meta and time travel weirdness, and it is fascinating to watch a timeline thread unfurl. And whatever else one says, it’s a fascinating story that’s captivated millions. I think it is deserving of its title as a modern classic.

However, as the years have passed, we have ended up noticing problems, big and small, and they nagged at us until we decided it had to be dissected. Our intention here isn’t to tear apart something we loathe entirely. It’s to take a complex work and pick out what works from what doesn’t. As I said, when Homestuck is good, it’s very very good. But when it’s bad, we get problems of every scale from various offensive comments to dragging pace to characters ignoring problems and solutions right under their noses to an absolute collapse of every theme and statement the comic stood for before.

The comic is ludicrously long; eight thousand pages, or thereabouts, to be specific. Officially one of the longest works of fiction in the English language, in fact. Naturally, we can’t riff that word by word in any timeframe short of decades, and we can’t include every picture, even if that was permitted under copyright law. Instead, as comics have been done here before, we’ll recap most of the time, and include sections of dialogue and pictures when particularly relevant to a point.

Here are the counts we’ll be using, possibly to be added to later if we find we forgot anything. Most of these counts will only start to climb post-Act 5, but we’ll be keeping track of them from the beginning. Most of them could have been fixed with a decent editor, which is sadly a hazard of webcomics, but still frustrating to read.

TIER: Note: we started this endeavor months before the thought of a "technically not but still we'll count it" set of canon epilogues were a twinkle in the eyes of the fandom. That is, by the way, a whole 'nother can of worms that will be dealt with at a later date if that ever comes around. We're judging Homestuck the Webcomic as a whole, so no after the credits stuff is to be noted for whatever reason.

ALL THE LUCK - Vriska Serket constantly gets a pass or gets favored over every other character. This count is added to every time she pulls some shenanigans with which others wouldn’t get away. ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY? - Sometimes it’s not entirely clear whether a thing is supposed to be taken seriously or not. We don’t require hand-holding through every joke, but when, for example, we’re supposed to take one instance of violence seriously while a similar case is supposed to be funny, this count goes up. CALL CPA PLEASE - Instances of creepy sexual behaviour (and perhaps particularly gratuitous acts of violence) from the thirteen-year-old cast. Now, mileage may vary on this one. We won’t pretend that thirteen-year-olds are perfect pure angels, especially thirteen-year-olds growing up in what is openly supposed to be a nightmarish dystopia. However, when full pages focus on said behaviour, there comes a point of it being very uncomfortable to read. Clarification: does not refer to cases where the adults do something heinous, this is strictly when the kids do. CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS - When an offensive joke or comment is made, particularly when not justified by the personality of the character involved, or presented in the narration as being okay. GET ON WITH IT! - When the pace drags. ‘Nuff said. Hazard of the format, but it makes archive bingeing very annoying. GORE GALORE - For unnecessary and/or excessive torture porn which is treated less seriously because it features troll characters, and therefore less “realistic” blood colours. HOW NOT TO WRITE A WEBCOMIC - When the comic does something mentioned in How Not To Write A Novel, and it isn’t justified by the webcomic format. HURRY UP AND DO NOTHING - Characters repeatedly neglect to do something about or even react to terrible happenings, either because they don’t care even if they should or they forget they have the capacity. Not necessarily anything to do with their magical powers, either - characters ignore personal problems that are right under their noses, too. IN HATE WITH MY CREATION - For reasons that are unclear, Hussie chose to create characters he apparently hated writing, or at least ignored in favour of others. Every time he’s clearly disrespecting one of his own characters, this goes up, whether it’s by nerfing their powers or changing their personalities. RELATIONSHIP GOALS? - Romantic relationships in particular get fumbled quite often. Ship Teasing is used with skill, but that skill tends to be lost when the characters actually hook up. Fumbled friendships and family relations can also come under this heading. SEND THEM TO THE SLAMMER - When characters other than Vriska get away with something morally questionable. Covers everything from sexual harassment to not trying to save people from the apocalypse. SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS - Later on in Homestuck’s run, Hussie tried to make up for the offensive humour and casual -isms counted by Clockwork Problematykks above. How successful he was at this varied. This count goes up whenever an attempt at progressivism is waved in front of the reader but doesn’t stand up under scrutiny. WHAT IS HAPPENING?? - When the already confusing plot kicks it up a notch. Admittedly this is as much a selling point of the comic as it is an issue, but either way, we’re going to keep track. Points will be added to when it gets confusing, and taken away when a previous confusing thing is explained adequately. WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM - What is shown about Alternia repeatedly contradicts what we’re told about how different it is from Earth. For example, trolls still use heteronormative terms even after it’s established they reproduce bisexually, and the demonstration of the class structure doesn’t always add up. This count goes up every time that happens. It also goes up every time something happens which strongly implies Hussie was envisioning the human kids as white, despite his later claims that they were always supposed to be “aracial”, and every time their economic statuses don’t add up either.