#going to start her on the homestuck music next week

[concrete-the-cat]

@secondhand-sonder

Surprise is here!!

her name is sonder (technically dehya-sonder but that's normally too long so everyone just calls her sonder) and she is indeed named after you friendly mutual

she's very friendly and playful and regards the other cats as absolutely nonexistent even if they don't like her for now

she also has a collar with suns and moons on it in what is definitely not a pokemon reference but she doesn't like it right now

:)

[abundantchewtoys]

Beyond Canon, re: p666.1, 666.2

So, I want to comment.

The fact that the "session" Vriska has begun is no S***b at all but a therapy session in the hyperbolic helltier chamber. Hilarious.

It's cool how the page is basically Homestuck: The Visual Novel. The talksprites & dialogue do the heavy lifting, the background & music's there for the ambiance.

Upon seeing the time skip, Blaperile had the good idea that she might be in here for 6 to 8 years. Bringing Vriska closer in age to the other Meat timeline kids. At least, near the start of their journey to Deltritus. Plus, most of them are functionally immortal.

In a lot of ways, Vriska was left lagging behind. Her insistence on going out to fight Lord English meant that her own personal timeline has been so short until now compared to the rest. Terezi went out to search for her for years upon years, while for her, less than a week passed on Candy Earth? Crazy.

I was wondering what introspection could be forced upon Vriska, that would feel earned. I mean, the post-retcon version of her already did much of this on and off screen, it could've ended up feeling repetitive somehow. But no.

No, this feels right so far.

She spends the first two years (???) trying and failing to move forward with Tavros (and Davepeta). I would've assumed she only had those two locations to explore in all that time (Tavros' hive's terrain and her own). Until she started venting there.

Seems everything in Helltier Alternia is available to her. It probably just never stops feeling fake. Which reminds me a lot of the (revised) ending to qntm's Ra.

SCROLL TO THE NEXT ARROWS TO AVOID SPOILERS ========> . . . . . . . . In which the characters end up on a simulated version of Earth with the story's self-proclaimed protagonist swearing up and down she can feel the difference. And nothing what the people in here do matters as none of it's real. . . . . . . . . <================ END SPOILERS

So, what are the people in the hyberbolic chamber, truly?

Tavros & Aradiabot seem like self-aware versions of their past selves, like unawakend dream selves. Tavros even felt more confident than I've remembered him ever seeing. Hope this isn't because this was his pre-paralysis self.

I kind of wonder if the sprites are standing in for themselves in the chamber. Aka that Vriska hung out with GCATavrosprite-as-his-past-self all this time? Not sure though.

Aradiabot, you ask? Well we know that Alpha Aradia has been travelling to all sorts of alternate timelines and is very much much older than she looks. So she could've gone and filled in for Aradiabot here, too. She used to be her own sprite, after all!

But that doesn't feel entirely satisfactory, either. It kind of feels nicer to imagine Vriska's been engaging with "meta Tavros" and "meta Aradia". Aka, an amalgam of who've they've been in the story, to the people reading Homestuck. Very much a function of the Point, but also very much the character themselves as well.

In other news, how many times will Vriska end up 'dying' in the chamber, on screen? I mean, in the last part she went to lie on her quest bed. Not a lot of sleep happens on those! At least, not for long.

It's hilarious that Davepeta seems to have been designated Vriska's "handler" but has no real experience to help her along. I mean, that's most of the sprites in a nutshell, but still. If the chamber's supposed to give her growth, you'd have thought she'd be given a better helper.

Then again, the sprites might be constructs of the chamber too. Vriska might really be in here alone and the chamber just has her own psyche to work with. She's internalized she's a badass who doesn't need help.

And now she's slowly unlearning things. By now, she's learned to ask other people what they want to do. The prompt "What will you do?" was never about her, it was about the others.

It's going to be interesting to see what she has to confront in the Mindfang path, though. It would be wild to get talksprites for Mindfang or Spidermomsprite! But if it's about her toxically near-religious obediance to Alternia's obsession with ancestors… Yeah I can see her talking with a version of pre-retcon Vriska. Or Aranea. We don't know if she ever did meet a version of her dancestor post-retcon.

Loved how the page went and took in a larger part of the page, like during [S] Cascade. And the branching paths evoke the paths we got to choose from during the time the cartridge was corrupted.

Yeah, on rereading the text, I think Tavros & Aradiabot are elements of the chamber trying to guide Vriska along.

If she'd only contemplated what WORDS could've been better than the ones she said already, instead of jumping to ACTIONS (hers or Tavros'), it wouldn't have taken two years for her to get there with Tavros.

But that's the road she had to travel: Apologies -> Revenge -> Actually sitting down & sorting it out with the other party.

Now for her to unlearn all her other unhealthy coping strategies! Yeah she's going to be here for a while.

Neat bit, that bit about projecting though. It's true, underneath all the bluster, she was just a kid trying to find the best way to deal with the world she was given. And then, when she thought she found it, she put everyone in the same box with her.

And hey, Tavros' reaction (pointing) at realizing she might be projecting… Was that a reference to the Turnabout fangame?

Him proposing they could be projects for one another… Imagine them as moirails, dear god.

Tavros can very much pretend to be blue as he is now (as a sprite).

It's interesting to (re)learn how much Vriska was obsessed with trying to patch things up with Aradia. While Aradia was like "whatever, bye", lol.

And, is the helltier rung thing a real thing? Cause we saw godtiers physically represented as platforms! This seems more like Vriska's finally truly scaling her echeladder.

Like she skipped a few steps in growing as a S***b player, which seems just so like her.

Real on the nose that she spends all this years. Stuck. In her old home. Bent. To return to her hive each time.

Aradiabot's spiel about incremental change & the danger of cycles reminds me of the song. "I'm going around, not in circles but in spirographs." It's the difference between getting stuck in this chamber vs. the dreambubbles, too, I guess.

Waiting to see if this all really will end up with a Scourge Sister fond reunion!

[franki-lew-yo]

The Romantic (2009, R, Gothic Fantasy/Horror), aka the most forgotten animated film in the world

What if I told you there was a movie under serious threat of becoming lost media with no clear reason as to WHY it's been lost other than no one has apparently watched it besides me and a few people on Reddit? What if I told you that movie wasn't half bad and would no doubt have some interest peeked if anyone DID know about it?

The name of that movie is The Romantic.

It was released in 2009 and it's Rated R for nudity and sex scenes [insert Robbie Rotten meme here], though none of it too graphic. It was a pet project created by animator Michael P. Heneghan, originally starting as a flash project for his animation class before he expanded it into a feature film. The film was inspired by movies such as The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth, but what I see every time I look at it is a touch of Jhonen Vasquez, Tim Burton, and Roman Dirge- the guy behind Lenore the Cute Little Dead Girl. It's flash animation especially remind me of the puppet-rigged toons of the 2000s (again like Salad Fingers or Lenore). It's not bad, it's just not inherently 'feature film' quality flash, nor is it exceptionally artistic like Sita Sings the Blues in it's simplicity. Like, really, if you happen to find this thing it's not the worst animated project at all it's just amateur for a professional production. I've seen worse flash movies. Heck, if The Romantic were released in separate parts on youtube or Newgrounds as a series (ala Homestuck) I'm sure it would have been really successful and totally in it's element. But it wasn't.

Because next to no one has seen it and I'm lucky to have not only ever seen it when it was available for free but have also found it recently (hush hush, I ain't telling you how) I'm going to actually give you all a plot synopsis under the cut. There will be some details I leave out and I think I've spelled some characters names wrong. It's a bit of a surrealist film as well, so you might need some things explained.

Spoilers ahead:

The Romantic is set in an autumnal, surrealist world inhabited by humans and monsters and ruled by three gods; Po the goddess of love; Pik the god of Hate; and Pjorrc the god of time though Pjorrc was made to live inside a pumpkin moon as everything he touched rabidly aged and died.

((Tapestry art featuring the main three gods of the film.))

A young man (called “Romance” or “The Romantic” by the other characters) performs a bull sacrifice in order to summon Abbledepopa, the unseen creator of the other gods and ‘storyteller’ of the world. The sacrifice does not conjure Abbledepopa but, when Romance spares a monster that was ready to eat him, the monster tells him of a profit named Patience. Patience is a foul-mouthed dwarf living alone with an army of babies who points Romance in the direction of Po.

((Romance outside of Patience's house.))

Romance wants the god’s help because he has fallen out of love with his girlfriend. Po grants him his desire and restores his love only for Romance to return home and find his girlfriend with another man. Blinded by heartache and rage, Romance kills her. He then swears vengeance on the gods for ‘making’ him do it. In the midst of this vow, a corrupt prophet called Fat Daddy kills the queen of Vauxhaul (Romance's home) and her guards, and forges a new body for his newborn son with their bodies. Fat Daddy rallies the townsfolk behind him in supposedly finding the Queen’s murder into follow a new religion called "The Poetic End".

((Romance (right) besides the monster he spared at the beginning of the movie.))

Patience accompanies Romance on his quest and tells him to take Po’s mask, which hides her true face, once he kills her. Romance buys Po’s trust by weaving her a tapestry that tells her story: in the dawn of time Po and Pjorrc were in love. However, Pjorrc gradually became distant and Po became resentful when their daughter, Love, earned Po's original title as the god of romance and love.

In the present day, Romance sleeps with Po for over a year before finally killing her and taking her mask. He and Patience return to his home of Vauxhul only to be chased out by Fat Daddy’s personal army. They flee to Marshallton, the town nearest to the god Pik.

((Romance's hometown of Vauxhul. ))

The king of Marshallton, King Crookie, tells Romance of a prophecy he, Patience, Fat Daddy and all the gods are a part of and that the world is soon to change. Romance then fights and successfully kills Pik when he shows the god of hate his reflection in a mirror King Crookie gave him, but not before losing his hand to Pik.

When Romance comes down the mountain he learns from Patience that nine years have passed since his fight with Pik began. Patience reveals to Romance what Pik saw in the mirror that allowed Romance to take the killing blow; after Love had grown up and married, Po asked Pik to tell her where her husband was always running off to. Pik reluctantly revealed Pjorrc was disguising himself as a human and married a mortal woman. Po found Pjorrc and his pregnant second wife, forcing Pjorrc to leave his human family behind, but not before asking his wife to name their son “Patience”. In retaliation for his treachery, Po proceeded to sleep with fifty men and produce the fifty bastard children in Patience’s house.

((Fat Daddy, the main villain.))

Marshallton and the entire rest of the world has fallen to the rule of Fat Daddy, who captures Romance and Patience. Fat Daddy tortures Patience into telling him how to get to Pjorrc but is unable to convince Romance to take part in his ‘new world’ or give him Po’s mask. Romance and Patience escape and leave the village to be torn apart by the fifty babies Po had, now transformed into veracious monsters after Patience didn’t feed them for the past ten years. Romance confronts Patience when he realizes the latter is Pjorrc’s son. Patience calls Romance out on his mantra of vengeance and points out that all his decisions are his own, not the gods, and instructs him to seek Love herself in Po’s basement. Patience then attempts to confront Pjorrc but is cornered and killed by Fat Daddy before he can do so.

In Po’s basement, Romance finds Love nailed to a wall, her face torn off and half eaten by her deformed husband. Love tells Romance that Po ripped off her daughter’s face in rage over Pjorrc’s infidelity and Pjorrc did not intervene fast enough. Po then threw Love into her basement, turned Love’s husband into a monster, and wore her daughter’s face as a mask - which Romance had broken into pieces moments ago after Patience had shown him his face in King Crookie’s mirror. Romance then finds Pjorrc hanging himself. As he dies, Pjorrc tells Romance to take the hand Fat Daddy had cut off and sew it onto himself, which will in turn help Romance defeat Abbledepopa.

Romance traverses the wasteland and does not find Abbledepopa, but instead a golden loom. Having seen all the destruction he and others had caused, Romance sits upon the loom and accepts his fate as the new ‘storyteller’ of the world, as he begins weaving a new one...

---

I mentioned before the animation quality of the film and why maybe that caused people to overlook it. The only other thing I could complain about on a technical level with The Romantic is it's sound design. Some of the voices and music is a little too quiet and so all these key details I had to go through the film a few times to really piece together. But that leads me to the thing I like about this movie and I'm sure others would to: the lore.

It's very hard to create a new fantasy world w it's own customs, religions, history and rules out of the blue as any YA Harry Potter/Hunger Games ripoff book could tell you. The Romantic is so unique in how it handles the pantheon and culture of these three gods and their kin; really only four or five characters throughout the entire story aren't connected to the gods or prophecy in some way, as there's the main three gods, Abbeldepappa, and the prophets Patience, Love and Fat Daddy, who make up your main cast besides Romance. There's a lot that's intentionally left unexplained and other info that must be explained, like Pjorrc and Po's marriage and Romance's feelings towards the gods, if we want to understand the former. The movie is paced pretty well and knows when to follow up on what, it's just that again some of those animation and editting shortcomings might make it hard to understand...but I don't think THAT hard. Look, if someone can enjoy Starchaser: The Legend of Orin or even better surrealist world-building films ((Fantastic Planet comes to mind)), then I say there's no reason The Romantic wouldn't have a following. There's no other way I can articulate why and what doesn't work about the story except just to recommend you watch it yourselves, but before I get into that I want to talk themes...because I love the themes and tone of The Romantic.

I revisited The Romantic a week before I made myself watch Centaurworld and The Owl House for the first time...and what a week that was~! The Romantic has the vibe of those kinds of shows along with Adventure Time and Infinity Train ((so I hear, I haven't watched the latter)). It's surreal and you'll only marvel at 'woooah wut an acid trip' for so long before you get into the vibe of the universe. It also reminded me substantially of the Broadway musical Hadestown and not just because this movie is also a self-contained, somewhat self aware fable about the relationships between humans and gods - it's very raw in how the characters talk. It's very emotional and blunt in how kind and how cruel they can be, and it doesn't make excuses or really worships any one of them. Romance himself is the world's most likable Incel: he murders a woman he thought he needed to love and blames his emotions on the gods of those passions...except the gods AREN'T the manifestations of love, time, and hate - they simply dictate and oversee it in the lives of men. It's a dynamic I really like in religious works where Gods are powerful but not all knowing or puppet masters to everyone's design- they have morality too and there is only so much you can blame and get from them.

"You made your gods into excuses and your excuses into gods!"

-Patience. This here is a cool quote. I like this quote.

No matter what, The Romantic is not gonna be a film for everyone. We all have our tastes - I think I'm drawn to it and accepting because I've come to love these kind of worlds that used to keep me up at night - these trippy 70s inspired fantasy landscapes given a whole Avatar: The Last Airbender degree of worldbuilding and character worth. It also doesn't feel exploitive in it's violence, it's sexuality, it's grimmness - it doesn't feel like it's trying to hard or going over the top because it happens to be an adult animated film, something that I love in movies like 9 or Hair High but really turns me off in stuff like Sausage Party or Wizards. Whatever go watch The Romantic...

if you can.

-----

When I first saw this film in 2016 it was actually very accessible and was even uploaded to youtube by the creator himself. I don't know WHAT happened to Michael P. Heneghan, but simply put, the man's disappeared...like...REALLY disappeared.

Lookit his IMDB. He has The Romantic and a wapping two other projects to his name. His Twitter isn't very helpful either. He last updated in early 2020 and he says next to nothing about The Romantic. It's so odd that he would one day be happy with the film enough to host it on Vimeo and Youtube but then just cop out.

According to a Reddit user: "On Valentines Day 2011, Heneghan released the film for free online through all kinds of platforms including direct download, bittorrent, Vimeo, and even directly through Archive.org. He even joked about releasing a 300 gig uncompressed version.

I know I watched it on Vimeo probably as recently as 2016. Now I can't find it anywhere. The website is dead, the Vimeo video went private, even the archive.org version has been taken down. It really looks like he wanted to wipe it off the face of the internet. His newer website mentions it, but again, the Vimeo link is dead and even that website is closed for business."

It's weeeird. What happened Michael?

And yes, obviously, other people worked on the movie.

No - I can't find out anything about them either.

I'm betting on three theories at the moment: 1) this film is an SCP or some Candle Cove weirdness with only me and a handful of people ANYWHERE remembering it, 2) something weird is going on w Michael Heneghan and it involves too something about this film. It was a scam or a scheme or a hidden agenda weirdness, 3) Heneghan's doing okay he just doesn't like this film anymore and wants it hidden while he takes a break.

Look, I get it Michael! What was once our life's worth can become cringe as you improve as an artist - you're not the person making the stuff you were ten years ago...but you should still have the film kept alive somehow. Someway.

I'm seriously the only person to have ever made fan art of this movie on the internet. That just doesn't happen, and I don't think I like being in a fandom of one. The Romantic is a testament to the power of design and storytelling > animation quality itself. Too often I see people equate good animation with smooth animation, with a budget with squash and stretch. These animations are good but art is diverse and there's so many kinds of films out there, the value of the medium can't just be in one style/form. There's a lot of honestly wonderful pieces of art out there if you know where to look and you're willing to see where it leads you.

Don't let The Romantic be the most forgotten movie of all time. Reblog this post. Show it to your friends. PM the animation community reviewer people like Saberspark and someone who isn't Saberspark and smuggle them a copy.

Keep telling the story...

[hollenka99]

2021 According to my Tumblr Archive

January

Dream did a ‘face reveal’ at the end of MrBeast’s 2020 rewind video.

I made a Borrower AU after Tommy’s size mod video, causing me to lowkey get into g/t content

The Village That Went Mad episode of Tales of the SMP happened.

Posted Phil’s Little Friends then… never wrote more content for the AU like I said I would

Doomsday caused L'Manburg to be reduced to bedrock

Oh and the Capitol building in DC got raided or something the same night, I guess

Posted Proof of Friendship

Trump got deactivated on Twitter.

Posted Not The Boy He Once Knew

Heatwaves readers crashed AO3 twice

Created the Twobur AU

Tumblr promoted that weird Guy Fieri blog (fieriframes)

I created the Blood and Feathers AU

I made an MCYT artist shout out post

February

Saw Howl’s Moving Castle and Spirited Away for the first time.

The Haunted Mansion TFTSMP stream happened and was arguably the best installment yet.

Got 100 kudos on a fic for the first time.

Destiel Valentine’s wedding organised by a couple of former Supernatural actors that got hinted at then never happened.

The original Origins SMP server got played on for the first time.

The OG 4 Sides got their own Crofters flavours.

Ranboo attempted to murder God through bakery.

March

Posted The Doctor’s Sons

c!Tommy got murdered

Posted The Life and Times of TommyInnit

Posted the first chapter of Unequal Halves of the Same Whole

Wilford Warfstache made a reappearence in the WAIA

Destiel became canon in French

Was given drugs and had my teeth stolen

Destiel became canon in German

The Ever Given blocked the Suez Canal

TMA concluded after 200 episodes

April

SBI pranked their fans for April Fools

Prince Phillip died on Tommyinnit’s birthday

Started reading Homestuck

Heartstopper is getting a live action and the actors started being announced

Josh fight

Let Passerine break my heart

Updated Unequal Halves of the Same Whole with Introductions

May

Israel bombed Palestine

Lovejoy released their first EP (Are You Alright?) along with two music videos

Got into Orphan’s Path

Penis SMP

SAD-ist released her Passerine animatic which caused me to make one of my most popular posts of the year

MCC came back for the first time since December

June

Updated Unequal Halves again with The Futility of Talking

Flower Husbands reuinted as 3rd Life ended and I subsequently got into the series and the other side of mcytblr.

Dan Howell turned 30

Started a certain sideblog

Posted the first chapter of Blood and Feathers for Father’s Day

30 Days/Free Trial SMP started

Posted A Mislabeled Hourglass

Dan Howell came back to be queer for an hour

MCC (Pride 2021 edition), complete with Wilbur’s goddamn fire alarm going off

Good Omens 2 was announced

July

Markiplier said ‘mod is asleep, time to ruin her notes’ because of Sour Patch Kids

That super scuffed SBI Monopoly strream

England got into the finals of Euro 2020

Posted An Abundance of Theseuses

Hershey hunted somebody for sport

Updated Blood and Feathers with Laying Foundations

Tumblr Post+

MCC15 had more viewers than the goddamn Olympics

August

Posted my first fic rec of the year

Sanders Sides came back with a Remus- and Logan-centric episode

BBC Ghosts came back

Destiel works on ao3 surpassed 100k

I finally got to play 22 by Taylor Swift at midnight

Sean Lock died on my fucking birthday

Una Stubbs died like the next day

Puppet History came back for season 4

MMC16 was Ranboo’s first time participating

September

The gang beasts stream (that wasn’t super crucial to note fandom-wise but personally it was exactly what I needed after an emotionally draining week)

Blue’s Clues turned 25, along with a message from Steve

MCC17 where the Orange Ocelots won thanks to Grian’s 3 person clutch

Last Life started

A crisp rat got the part of a famous plumber

Deltarune chapter 2 was released and everyone went wild for Spamton

October

Russel T Davies was announced to be coming back to Doctor Who

Posted the October fic rec that the authors mentioned kept finding over the following weeks

AO3 reached 4 million users

The Professor got sent to prehistoric times and presumably died due to Ryan having enough

All social medias went dark due to technical issues except Tumblr

Game Theory uploaded a theory about ARGbur and every Wilburian started clowning on him

Lovejoy’s 2nd EP (Pebble Brain) was released

Minecraft Live with a victory for Allays and the future introduction of frogs

MCC18 where Tubbo won his first coin and Phil cosplayed as his oc

Critical Role started campaign 3

Brian David Gilbert released AAAH!BBA

November

Ranboo revealed his birthday and we all went ‘oh shit, you’re 18 now’

Unus Annus celebrated its first deathiversary

Sanders Sides celebrated its 5th anniversary

Maidtyn Monday to welcome him to Tumblr

Dan vs Phil returned for Hometown Showdown

Roleslaying With Roman had its debut episode

Encanto was released and everyone went Bruno, our beloved

December

Mangoball

Ranboo did an eye reveal

Spotify Unwrapped had weird categories, including 'dream smp’

Down With Covid Bus

Minecraft reached 1 trillion views on YouTube

Puppet History came back to give The Professor a funeral disguised as a Christmas special

BBC Ghosts fans got a deeper appreciation for Fanny

Tumblr banned a bunch of words for ios users

[macklives]

hey so this is gonna be a long-ish one. ive decided its been far too long since i did a session, and we did so many i can often forget what happened. i started in july and im pretty sure its been more than half a year now since this whole blog happened. and in that time, we’ve gone through 88 sessions and i want to know if i remember the relevant plot points and what we got up to in the last few sessions. a refresh/reminder if you would.

so i hereby commence my own little recap of act 5 because yeah no, its too much to do a recap of everything and i have andrew for that after every few acts. but i wanna refresh my mind on act 5 for now. so here we go.

1. alternia.. fucked up place. but its a place the trolls live on so what are we gonna do about it? overthrow the government? seems about right, lets do that with the next troll that gets introduced and if its not kanaya idk what andrew is doing by not having introduced the best troll yet. why the long wait? it was the second introduced? i honestly expected it to go in order when i first read act 5, because first we had karkat talk to jade which was the first new piece dialogue in the comic besides the main kids, but then we had kanaya with rose, which was followed by tavros, then terezi (iirc). so id assume we were following that order but nope karkat got fully introduced, then this random fucking juggalo called gamzee made its way into the comic. imagine my surprise.

2. theres been terminology throughout act 5, that i do not fucking know and will not remember and probably never will. like tf is a perigee again? i made a doc somewhere ill probably find it.

3. karkat’s introduction... short but very sweet. and by sweet i mean we got to know the depths of the angry edge lord. and by depths i mean karkat got angry at gamzee for typing in a way that he didnt like so he yapped like a chihuahua. nah, but seriously, i do like karkat tho, hes growing on me but only bc hes a bitch baby and his whole personality makes me want to mock him so thats the reason im not that annoyed and think hes funny, and the most harmless troll. even more so than tavros. and thats saying something. 7.5/10 bc im generous.

4. then gamzee... the high juggalo troll who has the worst typing quirk imo, i cannot for the life of me read it. but hes chill, i actually really like gamzee. hes funny and the least problematic as of right now. 8.5/10.

5. terezi’s introduction next i think. she likes playing as a lawyer with her stuffed dragons, ie by roleplay, shes blind, can see through licking, and she likes eating chalk, maybe its even nutritious. shes good. 9/10. 

6. uhh in the process of these intros, there are teams being made? karkat joins gamzee and terezi in, i THINK, the red team?? bc terezi likes red?? could be wrong, i dont remember the teams except that its red/blue to represent sollux’s duality in those colors. terezi then tries recruiting AC but AC is like lol sorry i have to ask this friend of mine who has authority over me for some goddamn reason and terezi goes yuck tf i hate that guy................... yeah thats all we have on the teams. pretty sure sollux had smth to do with karkat about the making of the leaders, and they did the “i hate me” and the “no i hate me more than u hate u” or whatever the fuck that was. they got embarrassed afterwards and deleted their messages. im pretty sure they have no messages because everything ends up being mutually deleted so their logs are actually empty. ngl, kinda enjoyed their convos, made me appreciate their characters. i hope we get more because its good content. i also dont know what order this whole thing is in, who contacted who first? couldnt tell you. ill remember later on. and since im basing this off from memory alone, gotta deal with what i remember. uhhhh so yeah. we havent met all characters yet so the teams have not been officially decided but we got the bases, which is that.

7. god i found it, and the only thing im looking at right now is the terminology list i made and what the fuck?? what the fuck?? you miss a few weeks and suddenly the word nubslurping comes up and you forget what the fuck youre reading.

8. im PRETTY SURE aradia is seen after that whole team fiasco?? or its sollux... maybe. wait. its sollux, right. i just knew someone gets introduced mid way through is all. actually, someone gets introduced after every 20 pages. i have no idea. but ik aradia and sollux go hand in hand.

9. oh shit. OH SHIT! RIGHT! I REMEMBER! so this occurs in the latest session i did, and not the beginning of act 5, but AG and aradia team up, right?? and sollux fucking gets manipulated by them and ??? idk??? they make him find the game, reprogram it and then make him believe its going to end the world (which in hindsight is true, but anyways) so he refuses to play it which was AG’s plan all along so she steps up and becomes leader in his place. but aradia says sollux will still play the game no matter what, but she never went through with the plan for AG but it was apart of a prophecy? that sollux wouldnt be the leader at all? that he’d still play? but it had to go according to plan so it could succeed??? we just dont know why yet. anyways, point being, she still cares for sollux since she did it for him rather than for AG. and thats what i recall. god tf i forgot about that whole drama until writing down “sollux and aradia go hand in hand” which gave me violent flashbacks to the memory.

10. oh and id give aradia 9/10 and sollux 7/10. i do like sollux but if i put him higher than karkat, id get crucified. so im keeping them around the same.

11. man i really like sollux and aradia tho, i may have put him at 7, but i really like their dynamic and i really hope they make up and aradia explains herself about AG. because from one side it looks shitty. and while sollux is rude and never makes up his mind, he apologized to aradia after going off, and that was the only time ive seen him be sincere, so im pretty sure he cares for her to some extent. and i think its somewhat mutual? considering the whole “did it for him” thing. man, i see potential because i actually like both their characters. theyre well written. may not have the best personalities, but i appreciate well written characters and homestuck has the best ones ive seen in a while.

12. oh shit, hell yeah, the more i write, the more im connecting the dots and remembering. however, the more i write, the more i want to just make an analogy post but thats not for now. jesus christ its not all about analogies, mack, this is a recap. but.. how does andrew do it? to not go off track??? hard. telling ya.

13. anyways, didnt we break the fourth wall at some point and have the demon gods or whatever the fuck speak to us in third person for the first time in the comic, after having only gone into second person narrative, right after we were introduced to sollux and his “virus”? the uh, the phrase “the demon was already here” was said, or something along those lines. first line in homestuck to give me the creeps ngl and i appreciate it bc it gives me motivation to know what the fuck its about. its cool bc you have no idea where its going and it sure doesnt have anything to do with the current plot, since the trolls’ session/game doesnt have fucking demons so im curious as to what the fuck that was about. and if i really have to make a theory, i feel it has something to do with aradia’s voices in her head which also connect to the gods rose heard when she started disregarding rules and told dave to look at derse without listening to music bc it was as if he was purposely blocking away their calls. like holy shit, that gave me the shivers. while i do want to know more about wtf happens after act 4, trolls are taking priority right now. just like we did with the intermission. no discussing the kids unless necessary. treat this as its own separate comic. and THEN we can connect.

14. ANYWAYS, tavros’ intro???? that comes afterwards?? with the fiduspawn that made me gag a little on the inside? yep. remember that. fuck that lol. -1/10 but tavros himself is MAYBE a 6/10? i wish we explored his character more in his intro bc right now he just looks like a character made only to be a victim rather than have any depth and i feel thats robbing someone of their full potential. give me more personality andrew, rather than a quivering boy who falls prey to bitches. im expecting more throughout the comic honestly and i hope he gets growth so hes not looked as a “victim” but rather his own character. he is still sweet, and i like him because i want to protect him, but id rather have more info, you know what i mean?

15. oh hell. kanaya had a chainsaw at some point. that made me happy. and didnt she cut off tavros’ legs?? and he got robot ones? and some creepy dude was looking and we called him saggy tits bc hes sagittarius? right? neat. that did happen. pretty sure saggy tits is ACs friend that tells her what to do. the more u know. OH and they all have colored blood similar to their text colors lol. that i remember... so tavros has brown, terezi has blueish green, um. karkat has grey the loser. and apparently it forms a rainbow which is nice. rainbow is good.

16. i dont remember anything else actually

17. wait no i do. AG appeared. shes a petty bully. idk what to say about her. we didnt get that much, except that she hates tavros but is okay with aradia. she also looks like a bottle opener. actually, i think she teamed with aradia to gain leadership rather than to “be friends”. and while that is similar to how karkat did it, meaning the gain, the motivation and how they earned it is entirely different. kinda seeing a trend tho. the leaders of the red/blue teams are both characters who wanted the role, but never had it to begin with. only to win their way into the position. but rather than ask non-stop like karkat did, AG manipulated others so she could be successful. not too sure if she also used aradia for that, or is actually motivated to become friends since they were “past enemies” and she needed a rebound. pretty sure its somewhat both. while AG did mostly use aradia to speak with sollux, what she doesnt know is that aradia is a bad bitch who never even thought about AG and only followed through with the plan bc she had a plan of her own. i guess we’ll look into that later. i lowkey want to know their history.

18. OH AC!!! she appeared for a second as well. love her. shes amazing. 9.5/10. and you may ask yourself, why am i saying “i love this character” but none of them are 10/10?? weellllll its because, and i cant stress this enough, 10/10 belongs to kanaya, i dont make the rules. im waiting for her introduction, shes my favorite and its obvious. sorry.

19. oh huh seems i forgot about the term “lusus”. which.. is.. their parents but not really, its these fucking weird ass creatures that the trolls fought in a cave or something as a child. i dont fucking know. terezi hatched hers and it died? gamzee’s also died but his goat sea dad was never really there to begin with so while it is sad, its more sad that gamzee never saw him? um.. karkat killed his own by exploding his computer bc sollux said dont run the virus and karkat said u cant tell me what to do and did it anyways. so thats on him. but apparently theyre supposed to die, to become prototyped during the game, right? yeah. i remember now.

20. thats.. about it? idk anything else, nothing is coming back to me apart from the shit above. huh.... im surprised how quickly things do come back to you the moment you rant about the plot tho.... handy trick.

cool. neat. fun. this took me too long. but im glad i remember a little bit.

[thewebcomicsreview]

What’s that? I’m talking about Homestuck too much lately? Well, too bad, it updated and I’m-a livebloggin’ it. This chapter contains a content warning for child abuse and I’m thus putting the rest of this post below a Read More, though I’m live blogging and don’t know what the child abuse content actually is. 

Looks like we’re with Jane, so this might be the chapter with Yiffy in it! But probably not, because they’re gonna drag it out. Incidentally, since the rebellion consists of two max-level characters, four god tiers (John, Jake, Rose, and Jade), and now Vriska who is the 8est fighter 8y far, how does Jane even stand a chance? Good thing for her that she pre-emptively took a hostage! 

JANE: (I've always been pretty good at crying on cue.) JANE: (Could I try staging an emotional breakdown?) JANE: (That could work; playing to people's humanity.) JANE: (Or whatever is the more inclusive term.)

I do like that Jane, a genocidal human-supremacist dictator, is worried about being “inclusive” in her propaganda. I wonder if she’s starting to drift from Trumphitler into Nancy Pelosi, now. Also interesting: She’s apparently using Gamzee’s death for propaganda value, cool and all, but her superpower is literally raising the dead. I can buy that Jane would rather use her ex-boyfriend for propaganda than revive him, but won’t the people of Earth C have questions? 

DIRK: Dude, the bowl. JAKE: Hm? JAKE: Oh, right. JANE: What is it now, Jake. JAKE: I brought something for our guest as well. JANE: You mean the prisoner. JAKE: Y...es.

I realize that Yiffygate made the patreon rocket to the stratosphere, but I hope we’re not actually getting to see her so soon. It’s more fun to speculate. For instance, she’s apparently getting meals in a dog bowl. Is that because she’s literally half dog, moreso than Jade, and is feral in some way? That’s been hinted at a little, but it’s also possible Jane’s just tormenting her to be a bitch. As we saw when she was Crockerfied in Act 6, Jane’s got a bit of a sadistic streak in her.

Well, that was answered pretty fucking fast! Okay, let’s not click next just yet. If we’re only getting one panel to speculate, let’s milk it like a dying webcomic franchise: Preppy bording school outfit, but with cleats, so she’s apparently an athlete. Lots of pink highlights on her outfit (shoes/socks/tie). She’s got a black dog tail, but appears to have light hair? I like this design, actually, or what little of it we’re seeing. I was half-expecting Yiffy to be a full-on Deviantart parody, but I think the angle we’re going here is “a mostly normal girl, besides being part dog, who’s just been absolutely shit on by life and every adult she’s ever encountered”. It’s not her fault her name is Yiffany, y’know? She didn’t ask for this. 

Let’s see how right I am.

JANE: Well, go on then. JANE: She's over in the corner. JANE: Don't worry, she won't bite. JANE: I've seen to that already.

The fact that this chapter had a content warning for child abuse makes this read a lot more “Yikes” than it might’ve otherwise.

DIRK: Jake. DIRK: You put the food in a fucking dog bowl. JAKE: (It was all there was, ok???)

I feel like this is actually worse than if Jane put the food in a dog bowl to torment Yiffy.

I told you we’d fall in love with her. I told you dog.

....I don’t know if the MSPA art style lends itself to slightly raised camera angles like this, it looks like Yiffy’s face is 50% forehead. 

*Lore hat on*

Okay, first off, dick move electrocuting a child. That out of the way. Yiffy is communicating in wolf howls (she must be a big fan of Toast, from my webcomic Saffron and Sage!), but she’s also literally being electrocuted so lets cut her some slack. What’s more interesting is that her Awoos are in red. 

Vrissy shares a font color with Vriska, who she’s trying to emulate. They even use the same CSS class in the site code. Tavros shares his with Gamzee, his abusive uncle (and doesn’t have the same CSS class). Harry Anderson has a unique font color that’s pretty close to his dad’s, but isn’t quite the same (possible to make Harry/John chats more readable, whereas Vriska and Vrissy being hard to distinguish is the joke?). Yiffy, however, does not speak in either Jade’s green or Rose’s purple, she speaks in red. It’s a unique shade of red, I checked, and while it could potentially be in reference to Dave, let’s get real

Obviously, she’s the new Handmaid. This was obvious enough that I was making that comparison even before we learned her red text and rebellious personality. So I’m starting to see what they’re going for here (and, god help me, I’m starting to come around to Yiffany Longstocking Lalonde Harley as a concept). She’s not a one-dimensional joke of a character, she’s just a normal girl having a fucking rough time of it right now and also always. Speaking of time, red is connected to the Time aspect, which isn’t confirmation of anything but a little note to put in the back of your pocket.

Also to put in your back pocket, Jane’s the new Condesce and Yiffy’s the new Handmaid. The Condesce killed the Handmaid. 

JANE: You've been a thorn in my side ever since I agreed to enroll you at the academy, little madam. JANE: Back then, I was doing a favor for two old friends who made a disgusting mistake. JANE: I'm no longer going to play nice with you just because of your parents, however. JANE: That truce is over.

That’s some efficient expositing! 

Man, I really am coming around to this Yiffy thing, holy shit. I actually think her reveal last chapter was actively designed to get fans to hate the concept as much as possible, and not just from a Controversy Creates Ca$h kind of way (though that didn’t hurt).The entire fandom has been calling Yiffy a disgusting mistake for three weeks, and now here’s Jane doing it, and we’re being asked to consider this from Yiffy’s perspective: Given a stupid name as a joke, shunted off to boarding school by parents who were ashamed of her existence, repeatedly told she’s a disgusting mistake and tortured, even the fans all hate her on sight, and she literally hasn’t said a word yet! That’s....legitimately pretty cool writing, right there. A deft and entirely intentional juking of the fandom’s emotional state to get us to hate a character conceptually so that now when the comic’s trying to get us to sympathize with her it’s an easier sell because we feel a bit guilty. I dig it. Shit like this is why I still read Homestuck, it can be very clever at times, even now.

(Pierced ears, in case the punky aesthetic wasn’t obvious). Also, the page with a gif of everything going dark as Yiffy passes out has a black background, which is a nice touch.

TG: but seriously, do you? AG: Not really. TG: not even about... you know? TG: her? AG: No. TG: ... are you sure? AG: A8solutely. AG: What are you, my moirail? AG: Just leave it, Harry. TG: ok.

Then we cut to a chatlog (with the all-black background, which is just really nice here at selling the mood), and even Vrissy doesn’t want to talk about Yiffany.

AG: It was Cute, 8lright???????? AG: Or, at the very least, a 8*cketload less vomit worthy than everything else that Went Down with our parents.

She’s “vomit-worthy”

I think the update that introduced the Candy Kids was the most enjoyable, but this was, by miles, the best thing to come out of the Homestuck EU. It completely redeemed everything this comic did with Yiffy so far and made it all work. And this black-background-no-image gimmick, while simple, was shockingly effective at conveying the lonely empty mood they were going for (admittedly it probably helped that I was already listening to spooky music), and it’s something Homestuck had never done. This was....

This chapter was great. This was Act 5 great. Like, it’s literally just beating up a child for a whole chapter, but in terms of getting the emotional response they wanted, this is Homestuck at its absolute best. It wasn’t just “here’s a cute girl, let’s beat her up a bit for sympathy”, all the stuff in the last chapter, infuriating the fandom like nothing I’ve seen in webcomics in years, Jade’s dog dick, it was all for this. It was all to get us predisposed to fucking hate Yiffany Longstocking Lalonde Harley so that they could flip the switch and make us love her, make the very fact that we hated her so much part of the reason we love her now. No other webcomic would do that, no other webcomic would have the balls to do that. This is why I read Homestuck, this is why I’m still hanging on to this rock has the wave of cheating dog dicks keeps smacking me in the face. This is avant-fucking-garde, man. I’ve done a full 180 on Homestuck 2. I’m sold. I stan. I’m Homestuck trash again. 

EDIT

Oh, and Vrissy suddenly passed out mid-sentence right around the same time Yiffy passed out (hmmm!), and apparently she’s narcoleptic like Jade (hmmm!)

[overthelillies]

fic recs for my friends

yeah okay so most/all of these are davekat im sorry!! arranged in no particular order also some of them are second person I Am Sorry.

Your Interpersonal, Intergalactic Relationship: A Beginner's Guide (8,400-something words)

A beginner's guide to playing hopscotch, overcoming internalized homophobia, and falling in love with your alien best friend.

friends to lovers! p cute

So It Goes (56,845 words)

They managed to win the game somehow. He's not really sure of the details, but it's not all it's cracked up to be. He's stuck in an unfamiliar body with a thirteen year old little brother who's terrified of him.

Somehow, he is sure this is his fault.

// i have not read this one. but strider angst and davekat yes please

Red Converse (26,648 words)

Due to a seizure, Karkat Vantas now has to learn how to live his life with two speech aphasia. He goes to therapy three times a week, suffers from awful headaches, and tries to avoid people as much as possible.

Due to a traumatic experience, Dave Strider refuses to use his words, preferring to relay his snarky comments and witty banter through sign language and typing on his phone.

They meet in a waiting room.

//THIS IS REALLY GOOD Altho they do have sex just skip it dw i promise it’s worth it

how...did you tell your friends (7,906 words)

Unfortunately, you don't fancy your brother's suggestion on how to break the news to John...

There's no other way out of it, you're going to have to just tell him.

//set after homestuck, dave tries to tell the most oblivious person in the world and also his best friend (john) that he and karkat are dating and it’s literally so good

Dave Strider’s Stupid Fucking Jawline (11,607 words)

Generic high school AU. Dave's jawline is really distracting and Karkat does NOT have a crush on him (shut up, Kanaya).

//high school au. lovely. good eating.

Gray and Red (16,084 words)

In which you only see color once you meet your soulmate, and the first color you see is the same as your soulmate's eyes.

//SOULMATE AU SOULMATE AU this is kinda very Angsty (Karkat do be pining doe) it’s p good

We’re All Friends & Family Here (And Frankly, We’re Sick Of Your Shit) (68,000 somethin words)

It's been about a year since the big Fast Forward, and sure, things on Earth C aren't perfect for everyone. But they're fine. Really. It's fine. Everything is super fuckin' swell, and that's that.

It's not like one night is going to change anything.

//post homestuck GOD THIS. IS SO GOOD okay so this fic is mainly dirkjake being fucking stupid with rosemary and davekat and also a lil roxy/calliope in the bg and it’s long but!!!! so very good

Red Ties (10,705 words)

Dave Strider's eyes never turned the color of his soulmates. With his rare eye-color, there's next to no chance they simply share an eye color.

One day he meets Karkat Vantas.

//another cute soulmate au! again. love the soulmate aus what can i say

i’m at the combination dunkin donuts & urgent care (3,920 words)

Karkat Vantas is convinced beyond a doubt that his neighbor is some variety of murderer, until they actually meet in person. Highlights include blood at the laundromat, Dave's weird obsession with candles, and a box of shitty swords.

//this is SO FUNNY short n sweet i promise

the calculation (2,481 words)

the fic in which Dave gets the flu for the first time since before the game and Karkat takes care of him.

//this fic is really funny and also sweet

Start At The Beginning (9,304)

//post-homestuck, Dave and karkat falling in love. the ending to thsi made me cry

I Love Cheap Thrills (4,773 words)

You’ve been trading memes with an international pop sensation, and your drunk ass had no idea.

Classic.

//this one is verrie funnie

Locked Up (9,272 words)

Dave had always been the one best prepared for the game. He was able to handle the shit it threw at them and push it down a lot better than everyone else could.

It might have fucked up everything else about him, but that didn't matter.

He was fine.

He was always fucking fine.

//angst. very nice

I’d Tap That (oh fuck i didn’t mean to tap that) (17,041 words)

Karkat finds his old school bully on Grindr. Dave doesn't know how to shut up.

// really funny!! sorry if these are getting redundant i don’t remember the details about some of these

Pale as Bone, Pale as Water (5,305 words)

//another davekat sickfic

Apple Juice, Chips, and Bandages (5,335 words)

Every time he comes in he gets the same three things. A bottle of apple juice, a bag of chips, and bandages.

//really cute!! they’re liddol and they’re friends it’s nice

The Land of Blood and Childhood Trauma (8,242 words)

When two dreambubbles collide, two anti-social assholes are forced to help each other through it.

//not quite as Angsty as it sounds! it’s good

ecdysis (6,077 words)

Karkat goes through his adult molt. Dave does his best to take it in stride.

//so i actually haven’t read this thought I did but Uh have it anyway it looks good

Self Sabotage and Other Symptoms of a Damaged Soul (10,698 words)

//basically dave grapples with his internalized homophobia, etc. very good

turntechGodhead is offline (36,999 words)

//I’ve already ranted to you guys enough about this you know what it’s abt it’s SO FREAKING GOOD

A Ten Step Plan For Wooing Karkat Vantas, Featuring A Multitude Of Illustrations By Your Esteemed Authors, As Well As Tips For The Aforementioned Wooing (11,261 words)

Kanaya, because she's a saint, makes you a list.

The list is entitled "A Ten Step Plan For Wooing Karkat Vantas" and features a multitude of illustrations in purple pen.

"So we're doing this," you say. Your mouth threatens to twitch into something dangerously smile-shaped.

"Yes," says Kanaya. "We are making this happen."

"Hell yes."

//dave n karkat! they go on a date. stuff happens. it’s really good

Catching Colds on a Rock in the Middle of Space (15,887)

Rose catches a bad cold and it slowly spreads to the rest of the meteor crew. None of them are particularly good at admitting they're sick, let alone looking after themselves, but at least they're decent at caring for each other.

//rosemary and davekat! VERY sweet

Dave’s Girl (2,527 words)

The thing is no one knew anything more about "Kitty" other than her delicious cooking (Dave obviously doesn't want to share – ever) but the guys are more or less already in love with her. Drew insists she's probably this blond bombshell with big, blue eyes, all curves with legs that go on forever and a great rack... Practically everyone in the team has their own opinion.

//this is so funny and also im a sucker for these kinds of tropes so it’s great

Songs Made on the Meteor (27,762 words)

Dave makes music and they fall in love.

//on my to-read list! it looks good

Looks Just Like The Sun (12,231 words)

“Holy shit,” you whisper. Dave joins you at the window.

There are no stars left in the sky. Nothing but blackness and a faint soap bubble sheen.

“Is that a dream bubble?” Dave says.

And then it swallows you.

//okay. does this have explicit sex? yes. does it have a very explicit image? yes. HOWEVER (hear me out here) I firmly believe that if you whizz pass those parts, this is a very good fic with great characterization and fun banter. send tweet

aight happy reading

[bladekindeyewear]

Boots reads Homestuck Epilogue part... one..??

Alright, let’s do this.  As I’ve said, the page after this one is all I’ve seen, I’m diving in unspoiled.  Also I gather from some of the non-spoilery chatter I’ve heard from my friends -- one of which warned me this sort of thing was coming a couple weeks ago, and I believed them (but didn’t want to) -- that this first epilogue-upd8 may not be the only epilogue-upd8, which isn’t surprising either given how Andrew works.

Alright, let’s go.  Hope my stomach can take it!

So, Page 1, the mock-AO3 page that’s the only thing I’ve seen before posting this.  The content warning is EXCELLENT, and gives me hope that this will be the usual Hussie-caliber and more humorous than heartwrenching.  :)

It also makes some serious sense that there would be multiple epilogues; from the sound of the summary, this one might focus more on John and then leave ample opportunity to discuss the others.

Let’s click page 2 -- oh, or contents: “Prologue”, this being a chapter list for this is another way to do it.  Clicking Prologue.......

Okay wow, this is novel format for the moment.  Good chance it won’t stay that way.

These first two paragraphs are well-written and ominous, sure -- describing stuff we pretty much already knew was happening, in different words -- but even though the writing isn’t really pretentious, there’s still a good chance Andrew *views* it as pretentious enough to find cutting away to art-style instead hilarious.  Onto the third paragraph...

Music and Calliopes the other Calliope is conducting, yeah... Oh, there’s a garbage disposal reference.  In regards to a black hole.  Like the one I kind of pointed to during Dave’s intro sequence in the Third Scratch theory and stuff in all those big theories.  The ones I was, er, wrong about... ahem.  Moving on.

“Your name is John Egbert, and you have just had a terrible, deeply pretentious nightmare.”

Pfffffffff  :D

I love you Andrew Hussie.  Reading on...

YES I see chat colors. Chat colors!!! I need chat colors.  Reading reading reading let me get down to them let me

Absolutely nothing of note has ever happened here in the entire history of the planet, which you would know, because you created it.

Baahahahahah.  :D

Okay yes I’m at the phone-sterlog.

Uh oh.

I am reading elevated levels of angst compared to usual pesterlogs in this log.  Which is to say, virtually any at all, really.  THAT doesn’t bode well for the outcome/overall tone of this epilogue.  :X  --Not to say it isn’t *appropriate*, given they still haven’t fixed/resewn Paradox Space together, but... yeah, *future feels* are popping up on the radar, that’s what I’m worried about.  I loved the tone of the snapchats and the feeling that everything was going to be fine, especially given how the ending “not being what I expected” shook me a fair bit, but to look forward to when that may end... D:

Yeah, Rose having some serious visions about some unfinished business they need to get around to instead of just fucking around and living their lives makes sense.  :X  --or at least some timeline version of them.  I’m imagining they’re living varied, excellent lives in a whole TON of timelines of promise that commit our imaginings of their potential futures to virtual canon, really, with the main thread that ties off Caliborn’s stage play almost irrelevant in comparison... that was kind of the whole point of the Ending of homestuck earlier, of that final anime flash, the fact that the victory and planet and *lives* they won meant a whole lot more than whatever Lord English’s irrelevant machinations were.

So... returning to the tail end of that main thread and seeing how *serious* it might be....... yeah. Kinda mildly panic-inducing. :XXX

You move the phone away from your ear and assume an expression you haven’t practiced in years. It is the look of a man who actually has something to do.

Okay that was good.

Ah, he’s twenty-three now!

Let’s click the next link. ==>

Fuck let’s not recount Rose’s substance abuse.

Oh, cool. Er, “cool”. Rose is getting some of Rosejaspersprite^2′s awareness of all her alternate-timeline doomed selves and their lives.  No wonder she’s worried about the substance abuse she technically mostly *avoided* in this timeline.

Light explicitly relating to knowledge, good.  That’s a nice aspect tidbit to have reiterated.

ROSE: There’s a different scale I’ve come to understand. Another dichotomy that’s less... emotional, I guess? ROSE: Consider, instead of the word “good,” using the word “essential.” ROSE: And what exists at the opposite polarity from essential is... ROSE: Something that is best not to contemplate.

ooh.  oooooh. holy shit.

okay NO, BOOTS/BKEW.  DON’T GET FUCKING EXCITED.

DON’T get excited.

It only SOUNDS like she’s learned to recontextualize the whole adventure in the rich context of the classpect system, that’s just your wild fanfic-y theoryimagination talking.  Shoosh.  (Even though she IS very, very, *very* clearly referencing the Light/Void dichotomy with the above quote.)  Just... tamp down your hopes, Boots.  Leave it at MILD hope.  Like cool porridge.

Reading on.

Alright, yeah, this universe exists beyond the timespan of the Green Sun’s influence.  Unsurprising, since it was heavily implied.  And she doesn’t have access to her expanded Green Sun powerset while *in* such a universe, which was also heavily implied by alt!Calliope or her denizen or I forget the exact conversation where it said she’d have to make the final journey without Green Sun powers or whatever.  That’s cool.  (Though having it spelled out more explicitly than usual does make it more awkward to have her use her powers for humorous purposes on MXRP in the future.)

OOOH DAVE KARKAT AND JADE ARE IN A PERPLEXING SOCIAL ARRANGEMENT YESSSSS  :D

Best news.  Okay reading on.

ROSE: You will need to travel back into canon and defeat Lord English.

Yeah I guess.

Again, the way the ending sort of put it was that..... our heroes did have to defeat Lord English eventually?  Or set right some prior stuff like doing the stage play?  But that part of the point of this whole story -- the Ultimate Reward -- was that it didn’t really matter, because they had earned nigh-infinite branching timelines of promise in a brand new universe where they could go YEARS AND YEARS living their lives in many of the ways they wished, richly enjoying themselves and starting civilizations that would last billions of years, loving and living and experiencing, only “needing” to go finally check off these other responsibilities in a single timeline of promise at the end of an extended period of vacation they chose with no particular urgency.  Branching years-and-years of essentially heaven as long as they EVENTUALLY fulfilled that particular endpoint, and they knew it.  More or less.

Rose phrases it pretty explicitly, though.  John’s powers are the only thing that can warp people through canon like that without restriction, so he was always to be involved, but... *he* needs to defeat him?  Does that mean alone?

JOHN: yeah, i had a feeling that was going to come up again someday. ROSE: I’m sure we all did. That is, even those of us without visions. JOHN: i was doing my best not to think about it. i guess we can’t put it off any longer then? ROSE: Now is the time. We are rapidly approaching a point of no return. If the decision isn’t made soon, it will be too late. The issue will no longer matter. JOHN: when exactly is the point of no return? ROSE: Today. JOHN: wow. JOHN: ok then.

Ouch.

That’s slightly more abrupt than the picture of branching bliss I just painted.

JOHN: fine? ROSE: Of course everything is fine here. ROSE: We’re outside of canon now. JOHN: yeah, i know. what does that actually MEAN though? JOHN: are you saying this isn’t really happening? ROSE: Of course it’s happening. ROSE: Just because certain events take place outside of canon, it doesn’t mean those events are non-canon. JOHN: oh. ROSE: In other words, there is an important distinction between events which can be considered to occur inside canon, outside canon, and those which are not canon at all. ROSE: The day we went through that door and claimed our reward, we passed a threshold between continua marked by differing degrees of relevance, truth, and essentiality.

Well okay then.  I was wondering why she used the word “canon”.  They literally DID escape the narrative literally as *well* as figuratively with that Juju, then, Neverending Story style.

Also, Light being highly tied to canon and Rose having spent so much time outside of it... yeah, I can understand the headaches more, too.

Alright, reading on, it seems Andrew is using Rose to more explicitly explain how he intends all the non-canon stuff he’s presented to us to “matter”, for those who didn’t quite get or fully believe the implied explanation from context towards the end of the story.

Heh, so the idea is that the urgency comes from “it’s been too fucking long since the story ended, and this epilogue needs to come out when an epilogue would still matter to anyone”.  That’s kind of brilliant.

ROSE: As long as we live outside canon, everything that happens will technically be “real,” but only conditionally. ROSE: There are certain crucial events inside canon which must happen in order to continue to prop up the legitimacy of events here on Earth C. ROSE: And you specifically, John, have a responsibility to make sure those events take place.

Closing threads closing threads CLOSING THREADS :D !!!!!!

FUCK is this epilogue going to be mostly devoted to TYING UP LOOSE ENDS and clarifying stuff??? :D  Like the HUNDREDS OF LOOSE ENDS that were left unanswered because the ending tried to paint it all as sidelined/irrelevant regardless of the fact that they hadn’t been answered/fulfilled, which had previously pretty much traumatized me around Homestuck’s end because I was (1) so used to Andrew expertly tying up almost every loose end eventually and (2) was a theorycrafter with explicit investment in the idea that Classes, Aspects, and most of these loose ends actually DID matter???  :D

Sign me the fuck up!!!  :DDDD

...I know it’s doubtfully going to be anything close to all I hoped for, but still.  Answers, contextualization, and John tying up loose threads.  Like that final frog warped in front of Jade as a child.  That’s good, that’s VERY good.  I’m excited instead of nauseous.  :D

--and yeah, reading on, Rose makes more explicit what I said earlier that the justification Andrew’s painting for this is “we have to wrap up all these loose ends before everyone forgets about Homestuck.”  That is hilarious.

Okay, so the juju is a big plothole. Heheh.  We’ve heard it called that earlier.

...Oh.  Oh huh.

Rose is pretty much explicitly talking about the stage play consisting of a bunch of non-canon ALTERNATE VERSIONS of themselves that mean the original versions of them living happily in the new universe won’t actually die.  Holy shit.  I mean we theorized that for a TIME with some of them but THOSE loose ends (like Roxy still having her mask on) were closed up toward the end...  So instead, having it put THIS way (preserving our ideas of them living full lives post-victory), and not only that but having John DO all this stuff RIGHT NOW to fix things retroactively with some really well-written contextual clarification we’re bound to get to help with the closure... god DAMN.  This is really good.  This is going to make a LOT of people feel a whole lot better about Homestuck.  Like me.  :D

...Pff, some other girl is getting punched by John in the face again.  :D  Don’t worry, Rose isn’t saying that this is the Vriska punch at the beginning of the whole Retcon arc and that this epilogue somehow happened in the middle.  (I hope.)

...Yeah Rose implies heavily that John is gonna die his heroic death if he does this?  Or it’s meant to make us THINK she’s implying that.  Yeah.  And she feels pretty fucking horrible about what she’s asking John to go through regardless, so.  (Yeah, everyone looked pretty genuinely dead but a few at the end of the stage play, but it was pretty uncertain.)  Either way, she’s acting like John isn’t going to “come back”, even if he lives through this.

Stupid feels.

Clicking the next link.  ==>

Hiiii roxy and callie!!! :D

Yes how polite of them.

“Ultimate self”?  Yeah, a sort of synthesizing of all the offshoots of her Heart and Mind, pulling it all together and realizing the full person she is and sum of her whole experience across all timelines, pasts and futures.  Yeesh.  Pretty uncomfortable for someone who ain’t a hypersprite.

...Roxy and Rose aren’t as close?  Is it because of the substance abuse, because of the Light/Void dichotomy literally-or-metaphorically distancing them (with how disparaging Rose just was about anything that isn’t relevant), or something else?

Ah, Kanaya hogged her until she got “sick”, that explains some of it too.

A bell tower? (DOOONNNNGGG)

Fffff interpersonal relationship mildangst.  Fuck

You and all your friends have dispositions affected by your classes and aspects. You think you know what that means in your case. But what about her? You can only speculate. Void is a place where things sink and disappear. Where they linger forever, but cease to exist. You aren’t actually sure if your feelings for Roxy ever really faded, or if they just grew numb with time and distance. Is it the same for her?

Holy fucking shit.  What a big middle finger to everyone who told me aspects didn’t matter to their personalities.  :D

...Though, I think he has it kind of backwards, since he still doesn’t totally understand all this business.  It’s easy for those in canon, introduced to this subject, to think that the classes and aspects affect their dispositions, to an extent where the reality (at least I contend) is that it was their natural dispositions in the first place that the classes and aspects were actually describing.  The power that was latent in their very personalities and tendencies to action all along.

Reading... Ah, yeah, a choice.  Was pretty sure this terminology would be important earlier.  It depends on what SORT of choice this is though... see, so far, Rose hasn’t given John a lot of really EXPLICIT motivation to go through with this, other than some mumbo-jumbo that would supposedly be “bad”.  And it doesn’t even address the black hole in his nightmares.  And here, we have Roxy and others explicitly encouraging him with regard to the fact that he can choose NOT to do this if he wants to.

The main question it brings up (to the future of this epilogue, how it’s going to be considered afterward, etc) is if this is the sort of Choice that John would always say yes to -- in which case it’s more canon than anything else -- or if he will end up being on the fence enough for a Terezi-style Mind-split.  Because this would be the PERFECT out to have him “die” in canon.  See, if he’s on the fence ENOUGH about going, then he creates two timelines that even both potentially have promise within the confines of this universe (since universes hold more than one timeline of promise, according to one of the Calliopes I think)--  One where he lives here, happily ever after with everyone, and another where he completes his Heroic death in canon to fix everything.  It would let Andrew kill John in this epilogue while still letting him live out eternity with everyone else outside “canon”.

He’d get to have his John-death and keep him too!  Seems plausible enough.

Anyway. Reading... it looks like they know more about this decision that Rose has told them, including the consequences Rose might have been dreading.  And likely know that IF John might die doing this, that it won’t be in a way that he regrets.

Oh wow, that whole Meat or Candy sequence is GREAT.  Silly to the core, and yet perfectly emphasizing the debate that... well, I mean, think about what Andrew’s been telling us all along.

He keeps TRYING to tell us that non-canon stuff is fine.  Trying to use that huge ending sequence of Homestuck to try and tell us that the fact that everyone is FREE from this story and its confines, free for everyone to imagine COUNTLESS ways things played out afterward for ALL these lovable characters in carefree futures, is almost MORE important than any of these stupid loose ends.  But some of us were really cut by that ending, the insistence that the actual final battle “didn’t matter” and that this escaped-from-canon existence was the true victory.  But if Andrew just upped and drew a bunch of bonus pages to start explaining more story, THAT would cheapen the escape-from-canon ending he wanted even as it satisfied those of us who wanted ends tied up, who wanted questions answered.  He had to find a very careful, very well done way to give us BOTH.  To write out the real “ending” of “canon” for those of us who needed it, without compromising the ESCAPE from the very necessity of it that was the essential point he WANTED to make with Homestuck’s story from the very beginning.  To carefully keep the endless branches of post-victory possibility and play intact while still, separately and with explicit hedging and qualifications, give us the potential results of one last canon thread to tie up the lingering questions that he so dearly wants us to recognize still “don’t matter” as much in the vast scheme of things.

And he’s doing it.  And it’s WORKING.

Holy SHIT.

I am excited for Homestuck.  I am excited for Homestuck for the first time in years, and my nausea is gone.

I’m not going to start theorizing again; that’s over.  But I’m definitely going to keep reading as the new Epilogue chapters come out, and do so with a spring in my step.

To Be Continued.  :D

[edvonstein]

which precures would read homestuck without being dared to

Boy howdy. There’s a question I didn’t expect. Well let’s see here and go down the list:

Nagisa: Got into it shortly after launch, after hearing Honoka talk about it.

Honoka: OG reader, has been around for most of Hussie’s stuff.

Hikari: She didn’t read it until about halfway through its publication run, but caught up in a single night. She made fanart.

Saki: She tried to get into it for Mai, but it never really meshed with her. Still learned enough through osmosis to cosplay both Dirk and Dave.

Mai: She has five sketch books that are just redraws of the entire series with everybody replaced by Saki. None of her friends must ever see. They saw. They didn’t get it, but liked the art.

Nozomi: OG reader, not the absolute biggest fan, but did walk away liking it.

Rin: Saw Nozomi read it, and tried a little herself. Then she met Kanaya. The rest was history and fanfics. And special flower arrangements.

Urara: Currently lobbying for a broadway adaption. She is undecided which role she wants to play tho.

Komachi: She has changed her writing pseudonym to John Egbert, to get a better likelyhood of getting her Pirate Hurricane series published. She writes more like a mix of Dave and Rose though. It’s fucking mind expanding.

Karen: She had it fed through her home’s in house cinema to watch it with Komachi initially. They all ended up watching it.

Milk/Kurumi: “Vriska did nothing wrong”

Love: Her and Setsuna totally are like Rose and Kanaya. She is Rose of course.

Miki: She knows she is everybody’s Kanaya. She spend some time making masks of the characters. You can imagine how well that ended. Her Kanaya cosplays are somehow still great for the family boutique.

Inori: Yeah, she read it. Each reading session was followed by a trip to the confession booth. Eventually she just started reading it in the confession booth. The priest liked it too.

Setsuna: Her and Love totally are like Rose and Kanaya. She is Rose of course.

Tsubomi: Yes she read it. No her friends must never know. She doesn’t realize all of them have read it too.

Erika: The only friend Tsubomi opened up to about Homestuck. Turns out Erika runs one of the main japanese fansites of Homestuck.

Itsuki: Main mod on Erika’s fansite. Tsubomi must never know. Nor her family. Itsuki still feels too uncomfortable in their skin for that.

Yuri: Almost OG reader, she and Honoka frequented the same forums. Upon casual mention from Honoka, Yuri tried it out. Her young friends must never be tainted by this horror. Hopefully Hussie updates soon!

Hibiki:Learned about it through Ako. Found it pretty sweet, but didn’t make it all the way.

Kanade: Also learned about it through Ako. her bi heart couldn’t be stopped as she steamed through almost all of it in one go.

Ellen: Had been following it for about a year with Hummie before Suite happened. Continued reading while on the villains side. Often plays Homestuck songs while busking, and has several rearrangements on niconico.

Ako: Has been reading Hussie’s stuff since halfway through Problem Sleuth. She was 7 at the time. There’s a reason she a) is so crumby, Karkat is her spirit animal, and b) she decided to go and become an extra af phantom thief precure.

Miyuki: She is a reading machine, and of course this would capture her attention. She came in a bit late but found it on her own.

Akane: Similarly to Rin, she saw it over Miyuki’s shoulder one day, did a bit of reading herself, and got pretty hooked for a while.The hiatuses however broke her streak. Oddly enough the main emotion she took away from it is a hate for Equius, which she shares with Nao.

Yayoi: Main fanart contributor to Erika’s fansite. Her and Reika spend hours talking about Terezi.

Nao: Never did read it, she was too busy with her family and superheroism. More recently though, she decided to kinda wiki crawl the subject. Walked away primarily with a hate for Equius.

Reika: Another mod on Erika’s fansite.She has found her path. Her parents are disappointed. Screw her parents.

Mana: Tried it, didn’t like it. Square.

Rikka: Wishes she could live on that first planet they showed, with the froggies. She tries to dare Mana, but continues to get shot down. Mana is such a square.

Alice: Found it on one of her internet binges to bring her temper down. It proofed a surprisingly good tool to keep her mellow, which is why we see so little of her inner rage during the show. Another Terezi fan.

Makoto: Somehow has never come across a single shred of evidence that Homestuck exists. As unlucky as she is, she might be the luckiest of us all.

Aguri: Unlike Makoto, she has seen what Rikka and Alice are up to. She did read it a little, and liked what she saw well enough, but didn’t stick with it. Not enough time, and her twin sister lives fifty miles in Vriska did nothing wrong territory, so clearly she must be better than her. (She isn’t.)

Megumi: Came across it on her own, read it, but lost interest.

Hime: Runs the discord server for Erika’s fansite.

Yuko: Does occasional lyrics for Ellen’s arrangements, both on youtube and niconico, and makes the occasional troll riceball.

Iona: She was in fact dared, but by Megumi of all people, after she stopped reading. There is no bigger Rose fan now.

Haruka: As an avid reader, it did cross her radar, she went through it, and came out more determined than before to be the best princess she can be.

Minami: Amusingly enough, stumbled across it during her internet binges boning up on marine biology. Feferi popped up in her searches somehow, and the rest is history.

Kirara: Fans suggested it to her. She read it. The most fabulous Kanaya cosplayer of them all.

Towa: Kirara suggested it to her after she herself had finished (by now the webcomic is done IRL) partially because nerds gotta share, and partially because she truly felt it might help her cope with some of her inner turmoil from the guilt over being Twilight. Towa is slow in reading through this particular one, so she is still going through it today. Results unclear, she doesn’t talk much about it, even with Kirara. It might be helping though.

(The remaining characters I don‘t know as well as the others yet, but I’ll see what I can conjure up. Intriguingly I feel this also marks the first generation of Cures that lived in a post Homestuck world, what with Mahoutsukai airing in 2016, and Homestuck ending in 2016.)

Mirai: Got dragged in by the hype over the ending of Homestuck. Dared Riko to read it with her. They did. They planned their wedding to be like Rose’s and Kanaya’s.

Riko: Got dragged in by Mirai. Would feel very big deja vu next year when they both became moms to Kotoha.

Kotoha: Her moms protect her from this vice. (She found it anyways. There is no stopping the corruption of the youth.)

Ichika: Heard about it, but didn’t really care. Unfortunately for her she is on a team with Aoi, Yukari, and Akira.

Himari: Closet fan, wrote several dissertations about the science in Homestuck on Erika’s fansite. Which is probably where her crush on Honoka comes from.

Aoi: Loud and proud, likes this retro comic. Has started collabs with Yuko, Ellen, Amour, and Emiru because of course.

Yukari: She was a depressed gay teen during Homestuck’s peak... what do you think?

Akira: She was a gay teen during Homestuck’s peak... what do you think?

Ciel: She would have been save. But Undertale dragged her right into this fresh hell.

Hana: Huge fan of Undertale, but never quite pulled together the energy to tackle the behemoth that is Homestuck. Did learn through osmosis, with so many of her senpai cure friends being raving lunatic homestuck fans.

Saaya: Actually dodged both the Homestuck and the Undertale bullet initially. Hana then tossed Deltarune at her, and Saaya fell down the rabbit hole.

Homare: She had some inner hangups about getting into the whole mess, but Hana did dare her, knowing enough about the series to know that it’s message might gibe Homare the kick in the behind she needed to give ice skating another go.

Emiru: Big Undertale fan, but doesn’t care about the webcomic herself. Uncertain if even a dare would work, she does her own thing... well, besides the music. She freaking loves the music.

Amour: Read the whole thing in one hour to understand its impact on culture. What else would make her crash and join the heroes? Jokes aside, she did do it, and it did leave an impact on her. She was the one who connected Aoi and Emiru.

Hikaru: What are the freaking odds that she hasn’t read through it in its entirety three times this week alone?

Lala: Had her ship read it to her as something to fall asleep to. It put her to sleep quickly, actually, like tales from home. Her ship didn’t fare as well. It’s one of the biggest crack shippers on Erika’s site. Lala only heard like ten percent of the story.

Elena: Has neither the free time nor privacy to read a webcomic that’s now a decade old. Likes listening to Hikaru’s ranting about the series. Also likes how somehow that ranting makes Madoka’s face light up.

Madoka: It is unknown how she found the time, but she is a freaking huuuueg closet fan. She wants to talk with Hikaru about it, but still feels too uncomfortable being public about it. Hikaru does however know that MoonSollux, one of the biggest fanfic writers on Erika’s site, is her, but will wait for Madoka to come out of her shell in her own time.

Yuni: Missed the whole mess being a space alien idol phantom thief. Is getting a very wrong idea about human culture from Hikaru’s ranting. A dare would totally work.

(I have zero grasp on the Healin’ Good Girls, so not gonna do them.)

[bonepranks-a]

. OUT          i’ve been wanting to write extensively about my experience playing undertale/intro to the fandom so... i’m gonna do that. it’s below the cut if u want, it’s very long -- I eventually want to condense it to perhaps share elsewhere, so consider this a first draft.

I don’t consider myself a video game fan. As a kid, my interests were grounded in more “outside” activities, and I was rarely seen without a book in hand. We couldn’t afford gaming consoles, and my parents were vehemently against anything that promoted violence (I wasn’t allowed to go to a laser tag birthday party. Yes, I’m serious.) And that’s what video games were to them, especially my mom. Violent games about shooting and killing people.

As a result, I was very out of the loop when it came to gaming culture. I would watch my friends play Mario Kart at their houses, I think I did Wii Bowling with my grandma once... but other than that? I didn’t know what was going on. I missed the Minecraft craze when I was in middle school. Even mindless iPhone games just didn’t interest me. 

Of course, internet fandom did not escape me. As I got into high school, my interests shifted a lot. When I was more free to use the computer, I practically lived on tumblr (though didn’t we all?). And so even things that weren’t my specific interests were still on my radar. Undertale was..... perhaps the exception to that.

Do you remember those memes that were like “here’s me describing a fandom I only know from my dash”? If you had given me Undetale, I wouldn’t have been able to say anything. (Looking back on it, I’m pretty sure I thought Undertale and Homestuck were the same thing.) “Sans Undertale” was something I had heard before, but I didn’t know who or what that was. Hilarious, in retrospect.

And for context -- when Undertale came out, I was a senior. I wasn’t new to internet fandom, I was very aware. And yet, any knowledge of the game just managed to slip past me somehow. Beyond the fact that it existed, I couldn’t tell you anything. Still though, it seems like Undertale was just... always there. For a lot longer than it really was (again, maybe because I thought it was Homestuck?)

So, we fast forward three years. It’s  I’m a junior in college, it’s November, and I’m RPing over on my Tyrone (Gravity Falls) blog. Saturn picks back up her Chara muse, and suddenly all these Undertale blogs start following me. I try to write with as many of them as I can, but I really don’t know what’s going on, and I don’t like writing with fandoms characters from fandoms I don’t know. (That’s actually why I got into Gravity Falls - a Ford followed me on my Star Trek blog, and the rest os history.) So anyway -- I absolutely fall in love with Chara as a character, and the little bits of the story I know through Saturn. I had heard mixed things about the game itself, even people who enjoyed the characters saying things they didn’t like about it. And eventually, on New Year’s Day, with nothing better to do, I decided to bite the bullet and just play.

Needless to say, I had a difficult time. With no video game experience, dodging attacks in the bullet-hell world of Undertale was nearly impossible. But, luckily for me, I was also.... extremely clueless and unobservant. I do recall finding the Faded Ribbon in the Ruins, but I never figured out how to equip items so I went through a majority of the game wearing only the bandage. And of course, that meant that I fled. From.... everything. Which is a fine way to play if you don’t later need money for healing items. I missed a lot of small things along the way too... it’s frankly embarrassing looking back on it. But because I never figured out how to spare, Toriel gave me quite a bit of trouble. And...... in the end, I killed her. I didn’t mean or want to, but I couldn’t figure out any other way. And I didn’t even feel that bad about it. She had creeped me out a bit, unsettled at how much she wanted to keep me with her.

Onto Snowdin. Everything was fine at first, and I decided I wasn’t going to kill anyone else --  just kept running away. Until I got to Dogamy and Dogaressa. I couldn’t avoid their attacks, and eventually I got my first game over. When my game reloaded, I was..... back in the ruins?

Surprise! I never figured out how Save points worked, either.

I somehow managed to save in the crystalized cheese room without realizing what I was doing. But all my progress after that, I lost. I took some time to really evaluate what I was doing. I had started to finally feel guilty for killing Toriel (I think I tried to call her once, and the “but nobody came” message fucked me up), and so I resolved to fix my mistakes and not kill her this time. 

I went into her battle and decided I was only going to fight her until she had low HP, and then use a different tactic (had I figured out sparing by this point?? I think maybe.... maybe.) But once again, I failed. I killed her AGAIN. And for anyone who’s never experienced that.... she says something very unsettling.

So after that, I reached Flowey again. and uh -- 

Needless to say, I was very freaked out by this point. But I persisted. I moved through the rest of Snowdin with minimal trouble, and went on to Waterfall. Undyne.... was a whole other issue. Dodging her attacks was incredibly difficult. My tiny computer keyboard was just not suited to the rapid precise succession in which I had to press the arrows. So I died... and died.... and died. But, the more I played, the better I got. I looked up the fight mechanics, I knew exactly what I had to do to beat her. I actually made it to the Papyrus phone call, which of course is the end of the battle. But dumbass me, didn’t realize that she catches you again after, and that you can flee again right away. So I start fighting her again. I knew that attacking her instead of sparing makes her attacks easier, so that’s what I did. I actually managed to drain her HP! And then....... she killed me. 

I knew I needed a new tactic. And, having been running from almost all battles.... I barely had any gold. I had one healing item, and that was it. So.... I did what I had previously vowed to never do. I sought out 2 monsters and killed them. Stocked with more gold and more HP, I returned to battle. And finally -- finally -- I escaped all the way to Hotland. 

So, here’s the real kicker about my Undyne battle. By the time I decided to kill more monsters, I had already beaten the battle. If I hadn’t been so oblivious, I wouldn’t have needed to. And yes -- I already had Toriel’s death on my conscience, but deaths with the intent to kill just made me feel even worse. But god, I hated her. I was even willing to kill her. The night before I beat her, I’d been dealing with some personal issues relating to a person I really don’t like. I was determined to take out that anger by beating the shit out of Undyne. I stayed up late fighting her, and the battle made me so anxious that I made myself sick (throwing up and all). I couldn’t get her battle music out of my head. But... I got on the computer the next morning, and did it in one try. I’d finally won. But at what cost? Backtracking to her house revealed... this:

And for the first time, the consequences of my actions, even the smallest ones, started to set in. But it was too late to do anything about it now, so on I went. I killed monsters in Hotland because at this point, there was no point in doing anything else. I remember killing the Royal Guards... I never even learned about their love for each other. As I got to New Home and did the walk through the hallway, hearing the monsters tell the story, I started crying. Now, I’m not a crier normally. Very few things can elicit actual tears from me, but that did. And when I reached Sans in the judgement hall, and he revealed the meaning of EXP and LOVE, I understood. I realized what I had done, and I hated myself for getting this far like this. But again, too late. 

I went on to Asgore, and.... I just couldn’t. His attacks were too strong, I was too weak, I had eaten the pie already, and I still didn’t have enough money to even buy Temmie Armor. I was stuck. His battle was too difficult, and I no longer had the Determination to keep going. I tried to make some strategies, I thought maybe taking some time would help. But a few days turned into a week, and a week turned into two weeks, and eventually I started wondering if I would ever pick it back up again. Finally, I decided that I wanted to right my wrongs. I reset, without finishing my neutral run, and played Pacifist, properly. 

Pacifist runs are the same across the board, so I won’t give you too many details. Well, except the few things the game remembered from before...

Thanks Flowey.

And that was that. I laughed, I cried.... I knew a lot of the twists already, but there were so many wonderful surprises I didn’t know about. I could feel the love the game radiated -- and yes, I do love Undyne now more than almost any character from anything.

So, two months after playing, I’m reflecting on my choices, and what I’ve done since. I feel like I’ve dived into the 2015 fandom, but three years later. It’s odd, discovering such old content for the first time. I’ve introduced a few friends to the game, and though I tried to not backseat game, they asked for help and I readily gave it. But I told from from the get-go: don’t kill anything. My biggest fear was that they would kill monsters by accident, get to the end, but not like the game enough to go back and play the whole thing again. And I was convinced that the true ending is what makes the game so meaningful.

I was wrong.

As much as the ending got to me, I think I needed the experience of my first run -- with all my messy murders and shambling gameplay tactics -- to make the happy ending sink in. Which is what, I believe, was the intention of the game from the beginning. Toby knew that a lot of people would go into the game thinking they had to kill, and by the time they realized otherwise, it would be too late. The game is designed in such a way that playing it twice isn’t entirely tedious, with plenty of hidden gems you only get to find by making difference choices. Feeling your sins crawling on your back, realizing that you’ve been a villain, hearing Papyrus tell you that Undyne’s called you a murderer -- it makes you feel. It gives you an odd attachment to the characters that I don’t think you actually get if you go Pacifist the first time.

And no, I never finished my neutral run. I never was faced with the decision of whether or not to kill Asgore, already having blood (er, dust) on my hands. I never had to decide what to do about killing Flowey either. For an intentional Pacifist run, those questions were no-brainers. I never got to see what my phone call would be like (the Undyne ending is some scary shit from what I can tell). I sort of wish I had. But in the end, I think it says a lot that I literally couldn’t despite being so close.

My friends never got any of that experience. One of them went on to say something like “how could anyone kill people!!! They’re all so nice!! Imagine killing Toriel!! Anyone who does genocide is a terrible person!” And.... well, I know that it’s that kind of logic that gave the fandom such a bad reputation in the early days. And I just don’t agree. Not because I want to justify my actions, but because I really think that you don’t get the full impact of the story and the true ending unless you’ve gotten a “bad” ending first. But again, that’s just my personal experience.

I don’t know if there’s a real moral to this story. All of this was much more eloquent and had a purpose in my head, but writing it.... well, I dunno. I think if you ask most people, they’ll tell you that Undertale came into their lives at a crucial time. Or that it had some sort of big impact on their lives. For me, I find it hard to put into words exactly what it’s done for me. I just know it’s something really special. After all, a video game where you don’t have to kill anyone, where violence is never the answer, and mercy is the point of the story -- that’s the kind of game my mom would’ve let me play as a kid. 

But hey, I’m, preaching to the choir here, aren’t I? We all wouldn’t be here right now if it hadn’t touched our lives in some way, and I’m not saying anything that hasn’t already been said by people over the years. I’m just -- very very grateful. For the friends, the memories, the experience. And Papyrus, just because. 

[makeste]

BnHA Chapter 024: Todoroki VS a Giant Robot

Previously on BnHA: All Might told Deku to use the sports fest to become one of the popular kids. Deku was all “but I’m not sure if I want to be a popular kid.” All the other kids in U.A. came over to start some shit with class 1-A. Bakugou was all, YOU GUYS SUUUUUCK, and then this one guy with raccoon eyes literally declared war on them. The other 1-A kids were like AHHH BAKUGOU WHAT DID YOU DO but he was all I’M AIMING FOR THE TOP and fucking everyone was like WHOA and then they all trained and now it’s the day of the fest! Also Todoroki came up to Deku and was like let’s be rivals and Deku was like... ... ....YES.

Today on BnHA: Bakugou ad-libs the Athletes’ Oath. The sports festival kicks off with an obstacle course. Class A gets right into it. Todoroki fucks up some robots. Deku prepares to go fucking apeshit on this thing.

(As always, all comments not marked with an ETA are my unspoiled reactions from my first readthrough of this chapter. I’ve read up through chapter 44 now, so any ETAs will reflect that.) 

fucking go figure that the instant Japan’s population suddenly gets superpowers, they immediately do away with the Olympics and are all, “TIME FOR THE FUCKING HUNGER GAMES, BITCHES”

class 1-A is entering the arena first! well, they fucking earned it. and also they come first alphabetically. but they still fucking earned it

Deku is all OH SHIT THERE ARE PEOPLE HERE WATCHING

and Iida is like yes there are indeed a copious number of homo sapiens gathered here to observe our participation in this grand and glorious spectacle today

Kiri is like BAKUGOU HEY BAKUGOU LOOK AT ALL THE PEOPLE WHAT DO YOU THINK, BAKUGOU

Yamamoto. Yamamoto to Bakudou’s Gokudera. I love it and it’s a fine, fine thing

Bakugou you should be more grateful that you somehow have one friend now

so like seven other classes are coming out now, and then they all gather for the oath!

IT’S THE MADAME

“THE R-RATED HERO MIDNIGHT” OH MY GOD

WOW they sure can get away with a lot in Shounen Jump these days, huh

I mean, you go and do your own thing though, Midnight!

is her power r-rated. sob. I’m. actually really curious loll

WHOA WHAT

WHAT DOES THE STUDENT REPRESENTATIVE DO AND WHY IS IT HIM AND WHEN WAS THAT DECIDED

DEKU’S FACE LMAO

“must be because he placed first in the entrance exam” ah okay

what does the student representative do though

ahhh he’s climbing up to the stage

BAKUGOU’S GOING TO LEAD THEM IN THE OATH OMG

if it’s like the Olympic Oath then it’s going to be really earnest and idealistic and so weirdly out of character for him then

yeah boy you stand up there with your hands in your pockets and do this

...is this the oath

SOMEHOW I get the feeling it’s not lmao

THIS IS WHY YOU DO REHEARSALS FOR THESE THINGS U.A.

everyone is booing him and he’s like flexing up there on the stage and this fucking guy

and meanwhile Deku is standing there thinking deep thoughts about him

oh my god Deku you can’t keep doing this without warning

JUST WRITE A FUCKING FANFIC ABOUT HIM DEKU. GO ON AND WRITE YOUR KACCHAN META. YOU PROBABLY ALREADY HAVE ONE DON’T YOU. IT’S PROBABLY IN YOUR FUCKING NOTEBOOK RIGHT NOW

just. I can’t believe Deku is out here doing my fucking job for me jesus christ

but anyways. what the fuck kind of athlete’s oath was that lmao

and they’re all just shrugging their shoulders and getting on with it. well okay then

so @alessandriana tells me this arc will have some good Bakugou moments, and what with it starting off like that, I can’t wait to see where this is all gonna go

(ETA: THAT WAS A SURPRISINGLY DEVASTATING TWIST AT THE END)

also I’m interested as to what kind of superhero sponsors he’s going to attract (if any) with this kind of plucky FUCK YOU GUYS IMMA WIN THIS THING attitude

the qualifiers! let’s goooo

OOH AN OBSTACLE COURSE

whaaat the fuck lol. “a race between every member of all eleven classes.” like, all of them at once? because that basically IS the hunger games if that’s the case

can you even fit that many people on an obstacle course all at once

a four-kilometer lap around the stadium... exactly how big is this stadium

after a couple minutes’ research, I learned that MetLife Stadium in NJ has a circumference of 2 miles, so this is bigger than that. and MetLife is pretty damn big. no wonder Deku was intimidated by the size of the crowd

so basically the rules are “do what you want but stay on the course”

they could literally start murdering each other or some shit. well, like I said. hunger games

everyone’s lining up for the start and shit’s getting tense

Deku is crouching forward looking all serious and remembering what All Might said about announcing to the world, “I AM HERE”

is he gonna attempt to use One for All again? because he will fuck up his legs, unless he managed a miracle in training these last couple of weeks

“realistically speaking, I still can’t regulate it... to a reasonable extent” well that answers my question. except not really

“that’s why I have to overcome it” yeah, you just stand there and think vague things then, Deku. guess I’m not gonna get a straight answer out of you huh kid

light’s turning green!

here comes a fucking stampede

so exactly how many kids die in this event every year I wonder

where’s exit sign Iida when you need him

hmm Deku seems to be noticing something about the starting gate. probably that it’s the first obstacle

Todoroki is not fucking around lmao

best to just let him get on ahead. he’ll only fuck you all up

Bakugou and Iida should also be pretty fast here though

oho, Aizawa’s sitting next to Mic in the commentary box! and he’s still all bandaged up!! wow, he hasn’t healed yet after two whole weeks... this truly is a different kind of shounen

uh oh here comes the circus

”half and half” lmao

I see Aoyama is up to his usual glorious nonsense

Kirishima should not be fast enough to keep up with the rest of class A with his power but look at him go anyway

I BELIEVE IN YOU ALL, GODSPEED

also when will Homestuck and Birdman get to actually do something anyway??

and I am taking note of that “sizzle” fx coming from Homestuck, which is not helping me to narrow down her mysterious powers at all. I bet it’s clearer in the anime, but I’m kind of worried about spoiling myself now

(ETA: surprisingly it was not clear and I’m still not sure what the hell it is that she creates even after watching that whole arc. it looks like acid, maybe? but who fucking knows.)

OCHAKO SAYS SHE CAN’T BUST OUT HER SUPER-SECRET MOVES YET. SHE HAS SUPER-SECRET MOVES?!

OHO WHAT’S THIS

methinks someone may possibly have a mind control quirk! I was waiting for someone to have a mind control quirk!

Todoroki is impressed by the number of people who made it past his ice blast

were you just planning to freeze all 160 kids there Todoroki

Mineta is trying to do something. Mineta has forgotten that he’s cancelled

better

now what the heck was that thing

ehh? these are the robots from the entrance exam? how cheap and lazy, U.A. I want some Harry Potter obstacles. like dragons and sphinxes and shit

oohhhh but if we can’t have that then I guess I will reluctantly accept Todoroki vs a Giant Robot instead

actually that’s like three giant robots

actually that’s like... uhh... you know what, we’ll just say that it’s a lot

lol the kids from the other courses are like “the hero course kids fought THOSE?” yeah that’s right. show some damn respect

oh that’s right, Todoroki and Momo haven’t seen these before

[SLAMS HAND ON TABLE] RIGHT???! FUCKING RIGHT, MOMO!!!??!! YES, EXACTLY, SOMEONE OVER AT U.A. HAS EITHER A ROBOT-PRINTING QUIRK OR A MONEY-PRINTING QUIRK I SWEAR TO GOD

it would be so fucking funny if everyone got real quiet and turned and stared at Deku expectantly, waiting for him to do something. obviously it won’t happen but just the thought of it made me chuckle

but this time we’ve got good ol’ Frozone here, so

yeah they cheaped out on us Todo

hi hello, um, what

I immediately pictured dad being like an ice dude and mom being a fire gal. so basically like Daenerys and Jon Snow

(ETA: lol got it backwards, but basically)

Todoroki is now freezing the giant robot with ease

lol the other kids are hovering behind him just letting him take out all the obstacles for them

uh oh he doesn’t seem too keen on that

Todoroki did you just. crush a bunch of fifteen-year-olds

well that will certainly hold a number of them back. but probably not anyone from 1-A, or that mind control guy

Deku you were still that far behind?? get moving kiddo

all the robots are staring him down again

I wonder does it count as using his power against someone else if he uses it against a robot

I know it didn’t work the first time, but that was literally the first time, and it was before he knew the microwave trick

go punch some robots Deku

what kind of a face is this. no seriously. it’s like he has absolutely no idea what he’s gonna do, but he’s not gonna let that stop him. haha, well okay

BONUS:

HARVEY BIRDMAN

so you went for 4 syllables on both your first and last names, huh buddy. well then, I’ll go with “Fumikage” for now, since I’m gonna get “Tokoyami” mixed up with Todoroki I think

(ETA: in the end I was forced to memorize “Tokoyami” since that’s what everyone uses. let me tell you, it was exactly as difficult as I predicted. but I did it!)

“favorite things: dimly lit places” wow

(ETA: actually this now makes sense, kinda? except he said that while darkness makes his power stronger, it also makes it harder to control. which sounds scary to me but I guess he’s into it?)

“I personally think this guy is cool beyond cool” yeah I’ll say. dimly lit places. just sitting there in those dark corners eating apples while music from the Cowboy Bebop soundtrack plays

[momestuck]

Let’s read Hiveswap Friendsim... volume 8!

Welcome back, apologies it’s been a good couple of weeks since the last one of these. Last time, we had a fun entertaining art heist and a fun horrifically traumatising mass murder! What are we in for next?

This episode is called Of Stresses, Song and Otherwise. Our trolls today are...

Tyzias and Chixie. Tyzias looks like a programmer (though so far ‘computer nerd’ stereotypes tend to be yellow bloods, not teal), while Chixie... not sure what her deal’s gonna be! (Watch as I get everything wrong again.) Not sure if Tyzias’s horns are naturally like that or if they’ve been cut.

Tyzias

Tyzias is written by Lalo Hunt, who has previously written Tagora - clearly someone with a thing for teals!

Tyzias’s theme kicks in almost immediately. As now seems to be standard for tealbloods, we have harpsichords.

Our narrator is starting to get the slightest hint of like... restraint about the ‘MUST BEFRIEND EVERYONE THAT MOVES’ attitude. They actually don’t immediately go for like... jumping on Tyzias and trying to forcibly befriend her, but walk past... unfortunately she falls over. Impressively, she keeps her coffee cup level despite tripping over a rock.

Her typing quirk seems to be using lowercase letters, and repeating all uses of ‘w’ and ‘m’ four times. OK...

The narrator convinces themselves that this is the prelude to some kind of teen romance where they’re the cool person who helps the fallen nerd. Uh huh. Our extremely cool protagonist.

So we start helping her out and find she’s a lawyer. That’s like... every tealblood we’ve met now? Canon said they were also civil servants but OK, I guess everyone just loves Terezi. (To be fair, I also love Terezi.)

We get our first choice, prompted by the realisation that she’s a lawyer:

Tradition dictates that one of these is an instant-death option. I can’t help but expect that the ‘obvious’ choice, picking up more papers, will be the one that fucks us over.

...maybe not. We carry on going, and find out our dear friend Tagora has been talking about us, and he may be in a ‘group project’ with Tyzias here...

We spend some more time trying to get her papers together, against the best efforts of the wind. The narration emphasises just how tired Tyzias looks - quite the contrast from Tagora.

In fact, that carries us all the way up to the second choice. We can either suggest a breather, or trying to sort it somewhere else.

Let’s take a breather.

Insufflation sacks! Guessing that’s a narrator improvisation rather than actual Troll terms.

We take her to a ruined tower, which the narrator has apparently been spending time in when they’re not busily befriending every troll who survives long enough to get a portrait. This merits a new background.

She’s not hugely impressed by the idea of urbex (unrelatable tbh, if an alien appeared and wanted to take me to do urbex i would be there in a heartbeat), but the narrator actually shows some backbone and encourages her to climb up anyway. (I guess our broken ribs have healed some by now? I can’t honestly remember if we’ve fixed them all in this particular series of branches...)

Tyzias explains to us a bit about the political order on Alternia - that the Condesce rules, and this used to be a watchtower before she got higher-tech drones and so on. She doesn’t seem entirely happy about ‘her imperial bitchiness’...

We reminder that she’s teal, which uh... gee, narrator.

Looks like we’ve found an Actual Decent Person troll! Wow.

She’s particularly fed up with her whole role in the system, which she describes as the work to maintain suffering - because everyone is guilty, no matter what, and trials are just a formality.

Depressed, exhausted, horrified by her society... this troll is pretty relatable after all actually.

We ask about political parties (lol, good luck) and rebellious movements. She fills us in a bit on what we know to be the Signless/Sufferer’s rebellious movement, and the subsequent rebellion by the Summoner (which someone might have written up an infographic about for you... pssst).

Tyzias keeps going in a spirit of ‘ah, fuck it’. And gets more confident as she does...

Sounds like she’s got some kind of radical law project in mind. To me, the idea of changing the system within is like... kinda obviously never gonna achieve the substantial change needed, but I can totally respect it as a harm reduction measure.

this screenshot is going on my main

We get to telling her a bit about Earth. The protagonist tries to, well...

That’s a way to put it lol.

How romantic!

Damn, this episode’s a bit real lol

As a final kicker we learn that what she’s been drinking out of her mug is... just water. She’s putting on an act to give people a reason why she seems so depressed and tired all the time.

And with that, she takes a nap, and we get another friend.

D’aww.

Unfortunately, we lucked onto the best outcome on our first playthrough, so that means it’s all downhill from here. Which is a shame because I care about this troll.

First, for our instant death option, let’s stand around paralysed by the image of a gavel instead of helping with her papers. So rather than the bait-and-switch I was expecting, this plays out in the way most people would expect: she tells you to stop trying to ‘help’.

I thought it was a picture of a gavel, not an actual gavel! But OK. [treacheryofimages.jpg]

Now let’s try the other option: helping her organise her papers someplace else instead of trying to give her a break.

Unfortunately, in the process of sorting her papers, we lose one. I’m sure that’s not a Chekhov’s gun or anything.

This is a Very Good typing quirk.

The bookhive (library) turns out to have, what else, hexagonal shelves.

That’s cute but damn, not gonna be efficient...

This narration turns out to be read out loud. ‘wwwwowwww, harsh’ says Tyzias, but says that’s basically true. (I would motion that nearly every caste in Homestuck, at least going by the characters we meet, is a nerd caste...)

Tyzias mentions a few. Interestingly she says ‘goldbloods’ rather than ‘yellowbloods’.

We learn a bit about her legislacerator training project.

The narrator doesn’t want to hear this, but I’m kind of amused by the ideas of ‘scrolls of evisceration’. On Alternia, they know all to well that the ‘law’ is just a way of describing the ostensible legitimising limits to violence.

Tyzias mentions the difficulty of finding scrolls that haven’t ‘been scrubbed nice and fuchsia’. Which suggests that the Condesce, or another fuchsia-blood has been fiddling with the law?

The narration draws attention to some of the recurring tropes. But to be fair, we’ve only actually had to fight a highblood one time.

But no, it’s time for more interactions between our friends! Hooray!

Are we still wearing his bathrobe?

The guy seems to know a bit about what Tyzias is up to. Uh-oh.

I’m so glad our friends get along so well!

Anyway after Tagora pisses off, we get back to working. And that’s when the missing page comes up.

Figures. We’re in the shit.

Inexplicable product placement. This, of course, leads to a pun: ‘goregle docs’. But of course, that is monitored by the Condesce.

It’s actually quit easy to get onto at least some parts of the darkweb. There’s pages on the normal web which list the .onion addresses of various TOR hidden services. It’s pretty fascinating to have a look around at what’s up for sale for the kind of nerd who actually owns a bitcoin wallet.

Anyway, losing the page scuppers our friendship. She goes to retrace her steps - without us.

Anyway that was neat. Total shock: Bryn finds the exhausted, depressed nerd with radical politics relatable?

Chixie

Chixie’s route is by the ever-prolific Aysha U. Farah.

So what’s the premise for Chixie? Well, it seems to be fashion.

I guess we are still in a bathrobe after all. Also... I would quite like to see the protagonist in one of Elwurd’s jackets. They’d look ridiculous, but it would be cute.

Anyway, we could always go back to our highly fashionable friend Cirava, but I guess our protagonist has other plans.

We seem to have found the ‘Alternian nightlife’. The protagonist briefly speculates whether it should be ‘daylife’ instead, but seemingly not. We pop round the back of a club, which merits a different take on the whole ‘back alley and dumpster’ setting!

Chixie shows up, standing outside a door. The protagonist contemplates a disguise, and we get a joke about cosplayers...

It seems like she’s maybe trying to convince the people behind the door she’s propped open to let her perform. We have the choice of grabbing the door or standing there like an asshole. Let’s grab the door, since that seems like the obvious option. Of course, you never know with this game if the ‘obvious’ choice will cause you to fuck up and accidentally murder someone.

We are still wearing Tagora’s bathrobe. Haha.

So we let her in, and she says thank you... and goes inside, locking us out. Welp. Guess this was the instant death option lol.

So now let’s try the ‘stand there like an asshole’ option.

Her typing quirk is all-lower-case, and separating lines with slashes, much as you’d represent lines of a song. The narration describes her voice as musical.

It seems she is, in fact, a performer of some renown. She presumes we know who she is.

While we might be experts in moisturewave, whatever her genre is... not so much.

Speaking of moisturewave, Cirava gets a shout-out.

She uses ‘they’ pronouns for the protagonist, which is nice. Anyway, she takes us to visit her dressing room, and orders us to put on some actual clothes while she deals with harassment from someone who threw all her stuff out of the dressing room. Well, the ablutionrobe was nice while it lasted.

We end up wearing a dress.

This might be a kind of ‘fuck you’ to the earlier narration which seemed to implicitly mark the protagonist as male. Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking. Anyway I’m all in favour of wearing a dress for the rest of friendsim.

So does the protag! Nice :)

Anyway, we learn what’s up with Chixie. She’s been kicked off the programme because a band with a purpleblood drummer showed up at the last minute. Well, that’s bad enough, but oh god guess who shows up next...

I literally shuddered.

Please can this be the arc where we absolutely beat the shit out of Zebruh? Please Aysha, I’m begging you.

The narrator determines that Zebruh is ‘not the kind of friend they want to hang out with’. Which is putting it mildly.

Zebruh, incidentally, has not changed one bit.

We get to our second choice.

Honestly anyone’s guess which arc is gonna be the positive ending here. But let’s try exploiting our connections, as utterly odious as they may be.

That was absolutely a mistake, lol.

He goes off to go and put her back on the programme. She’s like... for fuck’s sake, protagonist.

Anyway, what Zebruh does in response to our mentioning her missed performance is... literally buy the club out from under the owner, who’s ‘just’ a teal, and makes Chixie the headliner.

Of course, this is obviously him just trying to get sexual favours of some kind from someone who can’t say no. Like so obvious it probably doesn’t even need to be said.

There we go. Can we please put this fucker through the mirror or something.

Chixie knows exactly what this is and she’s understandably not pleased. We’re gone.

Yeah that’s like... pretty fucking deserved.

Now let’s try the route where we like... don’t do that horrific shit we just did. Hey, finishing on a happy ending... hopefully.

Please leave, Zebruh.

She seems to like... actually like us, which we haven’t really done anything to merit, but here we go. She even invites us to follow her chittr.

She admits we doesn’t know we aren’t creepy, and we assure her we’re less creepy than Zebruh, which like... low fucking bar!

Anyway, the band that scooped her comes on stage. The narrator muses on whether trolls are forced to dress in their blood colour by law or tradition.

Wow, that is cruel.

She sings along...

Apparently like... all troll lyrics are black metal lyrics?

We get a second branch! How extravagant.

So, because I’m curious, let’s try ‘you should do something!’ I see this going badly, but let’s give it a shot.

She goes and puts on a phantom of the opera mask, and grabs a mic - which I guess is wired in and has its levels turned up? I don’t know...

That is a raw look though.

Time to interrupt their set. I am hype to see this, even though we’ll probably end up getting culled.

And she starts a friggin... rap battle?

It’s a rap battle that’s also a limerick! Yeah. That’s something.

Anyway, Chixie does... very well at the whole rap battle thing. (Only the first five lines are a limerick). Makes me wish there was voice acting, if only for this bit!

I strongly suspect this is mostly a parody of like, existing rap songs, which I’m too culturally ignorant to see. All the same, the scene is well written and satisfying.

We escape outside, and Chixie freaks out a bit. And then gets simultaneously relieved and disappointed that she can’t be identified because of the mask. But, since she hasn’t changed clothes, someone catches her... and praises her performance.

Ooh, diamonds huh?

So that was in fact the good outcome. Which means after that epic rap battle, we now have to see the branch where we go to a bar and get miserable. Yep.

Of course, on Alternia, we don’t have alcohol... but Faygo.

And it actually makes her drunk!

She speaks on matters of fame...

And of course, this is mediated by blood colour. Lowbloods must be hypervigilant, while highbloods will get praise regardless.

Again, the metaphor layer is paper thin here.

Come to think of it, nobody does seem to have a job in Alternia. It’s like... fully automated luxury imperialism.

Anyway Chixie passes out on the pile of clothes and we get a... well actually it’s given a ‘victory...?’ label, but it’s clearly less victory than the awesome rap battle.

So yeah. That’s an outcome.

And there we go! That’s the end of the episode. I have a... perhaps unfair feeling that like... if Hussie was writing, this wouldn’t be nearly so on the nose about like, oppression. But who knows.

Fun episode I think. This game’s grown on me a lot now we’ve gotten used to the format. Or is it just that if you spend enough time with a massive sprawling multimedia webcomic, you get a little obsessed with it, even if it’s not actually... good?

[mindareadsoots]

“Final” Thoughts on Homestuck

Now that’s a laugh. 

You know how when you play an MMO, you reach the level cap AND THEN you start playing the game? That’s kind of what it feels like to be finishing Homestuck. It’s been about a week and a half since I first watched Collide and Act 7, and there are an endless number of topics to discuss (which ironically might be my biggest problem with the ending, but we’ll get to that later).

Let’s start with the nuts and bolts: Collide and Act 7 are both gorgeous in beautifully contrasting ways. Collide is primarily animated with the classic sprite models, which sounds like it should be really lame, but it gives all of the fight scenes this interesting 2D beat ‘em up aesthetic. 

And then Act 7 of course is a goddamn anime.

There are so many little moments to pause and dissect (not that you want to with the epic music playing in the background) that even after rewatching both of them a few times in the intervening days, I’m sure I’ll be catching new things to appreciate on every subsequent viewing. 

However, despite the hidden potential within the finale, it still leaves a lot of unanswered questions. Unanswered questions can be fun. They can leave certain things open to interpretation, but there’s a difference between intentional ambiguity and refusing to explain shit. One’s an interesting starting point for a conversation, and the other is just frustrating.

In my mind, the two biggest open questions are what happened to Vriska and what happened to the kids after Caliborn’s Masterpiece. 

Let’s start with Vriska because you all know me by now so you all know that Vriska is one of if not my absolute favorite character in the comic, so it may surprise some of you to hear that I actually don’t mind the possibility that she died fighting Lord English. It’s a death that would be both Heroic and Just. Heroic because she died fighting the greatest monster across all of paradox space. Just because her arrogance and her need to be at the center of the action lead her to a battle with no escape.

(During the reaction stream, I mused that the absolute WORST case scenario is that somehow Vriska and Lord English both got sucked into the juju, meaning that next time Lord English comes back he has Vriska’s luck and ruthlessness in addition to Gamzee’s clown immortality and Arquius’ super intelligence)

The thing I get hung up on though is Terezi. The last we see of her, Terezi is out  looking for Vriska near the final battle ground, so if Vriska just got sucked into the green black hole, what then? Does Terezi just fly around out there for the rest of her life hoping to find some sign of Vriska? Or does she give up and spend the rest of her life wondering? Both options sound rather depressing.

Honestly, I don’t even need to know Vriska’s f8 for myself, I just want to know that Terezi knows. Like, it would honestly make me so happy if there was an epilogue scene like this:

John: so did you ever find out what happened to vriska? Terezi: Y3S. John: ... John: WELL! Terezi: <3< John: >:O That’s it! That’s all I’d need!

The Alpha kids are left in a similar situation after Caliborn’s Masterpiece. What do they do after the Beta kids get sucked into the Plot Hole? For that matter, how do they even get home after the battle? They showed up to fight Caliborn using John’s retcon powers, but they don’t have John anymore. Are they just... stuck there?

A few people have already sent me asks or discussed on discord the possibility that there are some time shenanigans involved in that fight, and that it really wasn’t the Prime versions of the kids who leapt into battle. On the one hand, there is a certain logic to that. Caliborn is the Lord of Time. He is the master of the Alpha timeline, so it makes sense that only forces from outside the main timeline could pose a threat to him. Notably, the version of Calliope who directly confronts him is also from a doomed timeline.

On the other hand, that answer is... way more convoluted. Remember that John did not master his retcon powers until after everything had gone to hell in the Game Over timeline, which means that for all eight of the kids to gather together to fight Lord English, John would have had to have gone on an entirely different adventure than the one we saw in the comic. The much simpler explanation is the one implied by the credits scene: on or shortly after John’s 20th birthday (Four years of peace. That’s all the kids got after everything they fought for.) Caliborn goaded John into a fight, and the rest proceeded as Caliborn described in shitty claymation.

And again, it’s not necessarily the self-sacrifice that bothers me. Lord English is no pushover, so some sacrifices had to be made to defeat him, but it leaves all of the other characters in a lurch where even they don’t necessarily know if their friends and family are alive or dead. So now (much like the fandom) Jake, Jane, Dirk, Roxy, and Terezi are just left wondering.

The whole situation very much reminds me of the original ending to Mass Effect 3. As released, the ending cinematic left a lot of players with the impression that regardless of their decision, galactic civilization was doomed and all of your companions from across the trilogy were dead or dying. The extended ending had to clarify that no, that’s not what happened (only because they retconned a bunch of shit, but let’s stop complaining about THAT ending when I’m in the middle of complaining about THIS ending).

I can’t say for sure if I’m picking up the intended implications of the ending. Maybe Hussie did want me to walk away from the ending thinking about how Dirk will never see Dave again, and how Kanaya was only married to Rose for three years before she disappeared forever. Maybe I am picking up the intended narrative and the fabled Homestuck Epilogue will be the story of the Alpha kids and surviving trolls dealing with the Betas’ absence, or maybe there’s something I missed and some series of time shenanigans can alleviate my concerns. Either way the story feels incomplete with so many beloved characters in limbo like this.

That really is the operative word. Incomplete. That’s my strongest impression of the ending. I could certainly go on (and will in time, I’m sure) but we’re stretching the definition of “live reaction” to the limit here. We’ll be coming back to this soon. Until then, cya later!

[yukippe]

once again, love drives me on

@minamomojirou-week

this is really late but hey its finished! this for rey @lesbiancreatii for running this week 

being between two really pretty girls is nice.

except for when the two pretty girls are dating each other. and cuddling into your sides. and you really want to lean over and kiss them and burrow your head into their necks.

so yeah, mina's kinda fucking dying. kyouka and momo are like yueei's power couple, even if mina did try something someone would probably snipe her. maybe snipe.

of course, that would require her to choose to fuck up her friendship with them which she would never. also neither of them would say yes, and certainly not both of them. because yeah, mina was horns over heels for kyouka with her snobby music taste, her homestuck comics in her incognito tabs, her determination to jump off a building and fly instead of being caught by hanta or todoroki and momo with her shyness when it comes to new people, the war she's waging with the costume makers and how she helps make new costumes for the first years with mei, her secret stash of hot topic dresses and chokers she has leftover from her middle school emo phase-

kyouka headbuts mina’s side as she cuddles into her and momo pulls both of them closer as she wraps an arm around mina. mina tries her best not to whimper, naruto runs on the tv and she swallows.

“vroom vroom,” kyouka says into mina’s side. muffled giggles tickle her as momo buries her laughter into her neck and mina’s going to start sweati-momo presses a kiss onto mina’s cheek and she squeaks.

momo pulls back, “mina, are you alright?” mina blinks. is she alright? well yes, she’s cuddling with the two girls she likes but no because the two girls she likes are dating each other and not her. momo brushes back one of her curls and mina’s breathing gets all sorts of fucked up. she’s just so close. on her other side kyouka’s unfurled from her spot on mina’s stomach, “we’re here for you, babe.”

mina feels like her face is on fire, this is like the eleventh time kyouka has called her babe this week. momo’s just nodding along with kyouka. “i’m fine,” she says. “lets finish the episode, i’m tired of kaminari calling bakugo sasuke kin and not knowing what that means.” kyouka nods and rests her head on mina’s shoulder. momo slips her hand into mina’s and squeezes it.

they’re almost halfway through the fifth episode when momo starts snoring. kyouka seems to be trying to stifle her laughter in mina’s shirt, she doesn’t have the same restraint and laughs as she gets up. kyouka tries to pull her back but mina shrugs her off as she picks up momo and carries her into her dorm.

mina places momo on the bed as gently as she can, which means she just short of throws her like a baseball onto the bed. laughter comes from kyouka as she waits in the door. mina waves at her in a floppy hand motion to go away or help as she pulls the covers over momo, she’s just folding them over neatly when a weight is launched onto her back and legs wrap their ways around her waist. she topples over on to momo and freezes, momo just shifts in her sleep and the kyouka is slipping off of mina and pushing her into bed and following after her and holy shitball fucks mina’s sharing a bed with momo and kyouka. kyouka presses a kiss to mina’s cheek before cuddling into her and mina’s trapped between two pretty, sleeping girls.

it doesn’t take long to fall asleep and mina drifts off between the two girls she’s stupid in love for. she wakes up to hands tickling her sides and she doesn’t have a chance to catch her breath before she’s jumping out of bed, her best friends are right behind her and kyouka tackles her when she tries to duck into her own dorm.

and then she’s right underneath kyouka and swallowing. “hi?” she offers.

kyouka laughs, then momo’s flopping next to her with a, “hello!” mina can’t help but grin up at her best friends she flaps her pinned downed hands at them in a friendly hug like gesture and then-then momo leans down and kisses her.

there is a lot of blinking and mina feels like her brain is rebooting and kyouka and momo have climbed off her and mina’s really trying to say something right now but holy fuck what. (she can faintly hear momo’s panicked voice talking to kyouka)

after a few seconds of rapid blinking mina manages to sit herself up from where she was lying dazed on the floor and attempts to start a conversation, “uh.”

momo nods at her, “yes.” mina nods back. she probably should’ve stayed on the floor a little longer but hey, better to make a fool of herself while she has an excuse!

“so,” mina continues. “did you really kiss me, or did i imagine that?” she hasn’t even finished her sentence before she can feel kyouka’s restraint in rolling her eyes, which, really. she has no place to talk because as the best friend mina sat throught all the practice confessions kyouka did before she asked momo out.

kyouka clears her throat, even though, again, she can’t say shit. “mina we’re dating.” yeah, she knew that. mina scooches back and rests her back on the foot of her bed, “duh.”

momo blinks, “then why were you surprised when i kissed you.”

mina’s confused again, but momo and kyouka seem to be very sure of what they’re saying, “uhm. because you two are dating?”

“no,” momo says. “we are dating.” mina nods slowly, she doesn’t understand why momo’s repeating the same thing and-oh kyouka’s sitting next to her now.

kyouka sighs, “mina, momo and me are dating you.” yeah oka-wait what.

“since when?!” she asks.

“since i told you i like you and you said same?” kyouka says, a little exasperated.

what the fuck is going on. mina would totally know if she was dating her two best friends who she was in love with. momo gets up and sits on her otherside, “mina, do you not want to date us?”

mina bolts up onto her feet, “nononono! i’ve wanted to date the two of you for months!!” momo relaxes and tugs her back down to her feet.

“cool,” kyouka tells her. then she leans in an kisses her and mina kisses back and momo’s got her arms around her waist and holy shit this is the second best day of her life.

[elfstuck]

War in the Chessfields

I have realized that, no matter how busy my life gets (guys, guuuuuyzzz, it’s Night of the Nocturne right now and I could be searching for Strange Chests that might contain the new Smirch gene!), I really need to get farther along in Homestuck because it’s starting to creep into mainstream politics. (He was told about Homestuck, and then he started reading it.) Also, Chibipaw says there is “good stuff’ coming up soon (that’s as much detail as my anti-spoiler policy allows) and I need to hurry up and get to it.

So... where did I leave off? Oh yeah. NinjaJade had taken out the wearer of my future cosplay project, but had missed PM sailing off into the sunset (moonset? Prospitset? Do they even have a sun on these planet-things?), so she’ll have to get the ring back to her later. To expediate that, Jade marries herself.

Oh wait. The four dots. Agh. I mean, aside from being equally spaced in a way that would make them endlessly annoying to wear, they... they may signify the four fingers. Homestuckians have four-fingered hands. I’m not sure if I’ve noticed this before.

Jade is immediately overwhelmed with the Spirit of the Ring: she gains wings, a tri-pointy hat with horns, tentacles, and a fake through-the-body sword. So... an amalgam of all the sprite encodings so far.

Next panel, turns out she was only thinking that happened. It doesn’t work that way on humans.

Elsewhere (dammit, I should’ve stuck with the last post a few more panels so the POV shift happened at the beginning) we have yet another WV. This one is WARWEARY VILLEIN who is either an animated stick-man, or is waving a stick on a banner: crossed beams, ragged red-and-purple robes and a white sash. He/it has a bucket on its head with the familiar Sburb spirograph.

Next up (aagh) is something with flash and sound. This is probably the Cool Thing Coming Up Soon that Chibi told me about. eep. Flash takes forever.

WV is being told to “Rise Up,” which is probably not supposed to make me think of Hamilton as this was written several years ago. But those words are gonna be attached to that song for a long time.

I click to the next screen. I am faced with this:

And I remember two things: (1) Firefox always thinks Flash is out of date, because every time Firefox updates ANYTHING, it decides Flash is out of date. My Firefox is a couple of editions behind (I’m not “updating” to Quantum that will kill several of my beloved extensions), so I’m going to see this A LOT. Sigh.

And (2) aaaaagh my laptop does not have a “print screen” button. It had a “print screen” macro that stopped working. (I have an Alienware laptop. WHODAFUK decided that a gaming laptop didn’t need a “print screen” button? Like, is that now an obscure and rare function? I STILL HAVE A CAPSLOCK BUTTON. I DO NOT NEED A CAPSLOCK BUTTON; CAN I REPLACE IT WITH PRTSCRN? (I typed that without using the capslock button, because remembering to un-capslock is always worse than just holding the shift button with my left pinky and using the wrong finger for “A”, and I guess “q” and “z” but those don’t come up as often.)

Quick check to the Alien “TactX” command center... huh. Print Screen is working now. It wasn’t last week. Yay, I guess? (Someday, I will once again have a boyfriend who speaks fluent Linux, and this time, I will get him to TEACH IT TO ME and I will defenestrate my laptop.) Anyway. Here we go.

3x3 chessboard; the kings move a bit, and then run into each other and the whole thing turns white silhouette. This means this is a meta-story-thing, related to the previous Grand Chessboard event, which I have mostly forgotten. (I have the link saved, though, so I can watch it again anytime. It’s on my schedule. “1. Run out of Stucky and Stony fanfic. 2. Rewatch Homestuck chess scene.” Blame dsudis for the delay.)

Clownsprite image appears. Chess pieces keep moving in the background. I have to screencap several times to get a good picture of the chess pieces (sometimes there’s only one visible) and the sprite with the pretty shade of aqua in the middle instead of white. I’m sure you’re all thrilled that I’m focused on the important parts of the story.

Next, he flickers and I fail to s’cap the transition between that and the full-layout chess set.

Please, someone tell me that someone makes these chess sets. That several people make these chess sets. Tell me the are sold with the label, “This Is A Chess Set, Not A Collection Of Marital Aids. We Promise.”

Birdsprite appears. (At least, I think that’s birdsprite.) Oh wait, no, that’s catsprite in the princess outfit. It is lavender, Rose’s color. Or one of them. Does that mean the davesprite will be red? (Do I really need to screencap all of these? Probably not, but this is as much for my entertainment as anything else. Also, I want to be able to reread them and figure out what I was thinking.) I considered re-trying to catch one with a darker purple circle or other higher contrast, and decided not to bother.

The music seems nice enough, what I can hear of it before I hit stop so I can screencap. (If you’re new - various suggestions have been made on how to deal with the Flash bits in ways that aren’t “stop & screengrab every couple of seconds.” I have nixed all of them. I enjoy doing this one fragmented piece at a time.)

And then the scene changes: the board is replaced with a WHOLE PLANET BOARD.

Rose and John’s sprites are in the upper corners, starting with top right and moving widdershins. Widdershins is a destructive direction; they are unmaking the world. (Erm. As obscure as Hussie gets sometimes, I have doubts that that particular bit of symbolism applies here.)

Aaaand here comes the davebirdswordsprite. Orange, not red.

 Davesprite tucks away into the bottom left corner, continuing widdershins, and the cubeworld backs off or is replaced by a round world, very bright and faint, with VERY BRIGHT FLASHING blue lines around it. (Same blue lines as above. They just got brighter.) Then the planet darkens (this is what happens when you stop the Flash every second or two; you wind up  giving far too much import to transition scenes.)

Imma make a prediction: Jadesprite is due to make an appearance. (Does Jade have a sprite yet? Something with a pumpkin?)

BUT NO! The world gets bigger, moves closer, until it FILLS THE WHOLE SCREEN! Then it fades out to white, and gradually (well, gradually if you’re stopping every time something moves or flickers), we get a new scene:

Aww, the rolling hills of Chesslandia, with its famed pixeltrees. We float over the landscape until we reach the castle. (Or maybe, “a castle.” I dunno. Maybe there are hundreds of castles in Chesslandia.) The pixelgrass fields bring color to the landscape, and a couple of pixelfolk play hide-and-seek in the tall grass near the aqua river.

Well, it’s got a turret and banners, and that kinda says “castle,” along with the whole, y’know, chess kings & queens motif, but that looks kinda small for a castle. Also rather isolated. Why build a castle if there’s nothing near it to defend? I see that there are people, but no town. Is the castle all that remains? Am I looking upon the desolate post-apocalyptic wasteland of Chesslandia?

We pass the people and zoom in, seeing the yellow banner waving madly in the gale-force breezes near the castle turret. This is, apparently, to introduce the army of Chesslandia, because the scene whites out again, and then switches to the marching hordes.

I am probably not supposed to think their little ± symbol reminds me of a leviathan cross, a.k.a. the Satanic cross. (Hey, if I make a CD cosplay outfit, can I have a purple banner with a pentagonal ± symbol on it? Or is he not part of this army?)

Then we pull back to see the huge crowd of them, and they fade, and a different banner fades in: this one is purple - and behind it is a yellow-clad army.

AAAH! The yellow flag is for Prospit, and that’s the Dersian army marching on it. And the purple banner here is Derse, and the Prospit army - complete with the same ± symbol - is marching. Here, have some Prospit army:

This isn’t because you need the picture, but because I captured the flash at that point so I can watch them marching and waving weapons, with the sky flickering in the background. It’s very soothing. Wish I could capture it as a gif.

And then... FIGHT! Armies meet on the battlefield! Sparks fly from their blades, which are apparently made from different metals. They both wear stripey shirts and chessboard tabards, of different color combos.

Guys. Gals. Whatever. Readers. I have been cheated. I thought Homestuck cosplay was limited to “t-shirts with a zodiac symbol + horns & weird sunglasses,” or “one of these four kids (also t-shirt with symbol).” There is AWESOME cosplay opportunities in this series. Nobody told me.

I mean, they told me about the tentibulges, because my friends know where my interests lie (or squirm, as the case may be), but even the friends who knew I’d done 6+ years of RenFaire didn’t bother telling me, “omg you should see the amazing costume options, and also, they wouldn’t be impossible to make!”

(I mean, I’ve looked into WV’s costume, but it looks difficult and too hot to wear at most conventions.) (See how I focus on the important parts of the story?)

Spaceship takedown attempt. Or maybe this is a drop ship. Looks like there are many such ships. Anyway, we see battles, and it pulls back to show the larger scene, and the horrors of war:

Well, the horrors of neon, purple-vs-yellow war. ... Is that a giant horse shadow with tentacles on its back?

Why, yes it is. Knight vs... King? Queen? We’re back to the chessboard, with only a tiny hint of a pixeltree in the corner to let you know this is the large-scale war happening above the ground. Then we get this:

I’m not sure what’s going on here, but they’re too cute to pass up. There are 9 little fellows, so they’re not “pawns.” Then a giant black chesspiece stomps into the center of them and they fall aside, scattering (I didn’t catch that picture), and then... the WV banner thingie is raised again.

That makes it seem like we’re wrapping up this storything, because that’s the image that we started on. It slowly pulls back to show an empty Chesslandia with a flower stand, waving a red banner.

The pixelgrass has return to the fields, although the pixeltrees have not. Or maybe they just don’t grow here.

AAuugghhh nooo... that was a picture of the past. Now, the lovely flowerstand is in ruins; fire everywhere, and a lone derseling wanders the war-ravaged fields of Chesslandia. :( We pull in tight to his grief-stricken, bleak expression (don’t ask how I can identify that from two white dots on a black circle; I just can) and then he (or she) oversees the huge battle on the fields below.

Woe. Woe has come to Chesslandia. Woe, and fire. Woe, and fire, and pixels.

Zir face is shadowed by woe and fire and pixels.

Zie is not looking nearly as woeful in this image. Hrrm. Then we see the Black Queen rise...

Then we zoom in again, this time to the scepter, which is full of clouds and the spirography thing:

This is all getting a little too “Men in Black,” with the world in a marble and all that. Are we going to zoom into the scepter again, to the center of the spirography symbol, and find ourselves moving into John’s balcony?

Well, no. We do zoom in, into the world and the cubeworld and such, but we get a black-and-white image of something shadowy flying over Chesslandia.

We zoom in again, and we see... not Spades Slick, despite the cut on the eye. That other character with the same appearance.

It flies with malice (don’t ask me how I can identify malice from that), but is faced with a lone Dersian defender:

We cut back to the war on the ground, the clashing swords and all that, but the combatants move aside. And this had better wrap up pretty quickly, because my printscreen macro just stopped working. (WTF? If anyone knows how to give advice on this, plz contact me.) Anyway. They move aside, and then snap into line.

Our lone Dersite with the tattered red banner leads them through the pixeltrees toward a set of checkered ruins.

Elsewhere, PM lands, and notices the missing ring. White Queen is not happy. There’s another huge scepter waving. White Queen flashes white all over, and shrinks - and hands the scepter to PM.

Looks like PM is in line to be the new WQ. However, the handoff is spotted by someone who is Definitely Not A Member Of The Midnight Crew.

Meanwhile, the Dersite hordes march to confront the Black Queen. Our purple-robed hero(ine) glares, and then looks upward, sees the flying not-a-bird person overhead. The Spadesy-person waves a swords and slices through the black scepter.

(I think I figured out the screencap problem. It won’t work if I have the Flash selected. Which is stupid. Really stupid.)

Black queen, missing her scepter and its four spinny baubles, also shrinks.

Heartsy spy leaps out and attacks the new white queen. (Gonna knock her into next week. This is a problem, because next week is a massive international holiday and it’ll be hard to find time to liveblog.) White scepter goes flying over a waterfall.

We see, inside the white scepter, the purple-robed defender, and it pulls back to see the world, and then the scepter itself, which lands by the banks of the aqua river surrounded by pixelgrass.

(That picture’s superfluous; it’s not relevant to the story. It’s here becaue I think it’s pretty.)

Aaand now I should watch it again and get a sense of the whole story instead of stopping every two seconds to ponder the meaning of each cut scene.

***

Two minutes and 15 seconds of flash that takes me an hour and a half to write about, all the while worrying that Tumblr’s going to have some weird hiccup and lose the whole thing.

So: back queen dead; white queen deposed by losing her marbles; new manager of each; war possibly stopped at the moment. White scepter maybe recoverable and could be combined with Jade’s ring to fix it. Black scepter broken; would need something else to fix. (Superglue?)

Jade has not yet entered the chessgame at the macro level. Jade needs to install Sburb and get into the game.

[abundantchewtoys]

RE: Hiveswap '17-09-14

IT. HAS. ARRIVED.

FINALLY!

Wow, it feels so unreal, but we're gonna do it! Tonight we'll install the game and hopefully play a little bit already. We've decided to install the DRM-free version, I just hope we won't regret missing out on any achievements or shit.

Dang though, I can't wait to see what neat little tidbits of the Homestuck universe we'll get to learn about. What vague conspiracies Jude believes in (or not) that we can snicker about. What references to old memes we'll encounter. (Is... Is that John Cusack?) ... The ones that What Pumpkin could make without infringing on copyright, that is.

Will there be references to Bro? To ancestors of the original A2 troll group? It just dawned on me 'A2 trolls' is no longer a valid descriptor to distinguish the twelve orginals from other character trolls. It's probably still going to be used, but I suppose 'Homestuck trolls' and 'Hiveswap trolls' is a valid distinction too.

I'm certainly excited to learn more about Grandpa Harley! Anything that demystifies those elusive Guardians is a gift indeed!

Over the past few days, we've seen the hype building. We Love Fine sending out mails, I think to promote new prints, haven't watched actually. And just now that we check our mail, it turns out there's a new release on Bandcamp, even on the Homestuck one, not a new one! It's... probably the Grubbles album? Probably? :)

So, without much further ado, let's go and see!

----

Ooh, the download also includes the music!

I wonder what the deal is with Humblebundle's "sign in to claim this page" link.

Oooh, the game is 1.9 GB (archived)! I don't know what I was expecting, but it's definitely largeish!

Heehee, I like the logo icon, HS against a spiral sucker background. (Could be used for a future pin.) The spiral will be an integral part of the key to the portal, but I wonder if it'll show up elsewhere.

The archive contains 277 files... accounting for a whopping 5 Gigabyte! Wowee!

---

Wow, that menu looked gorgeous. I love that the castle is taunted, even though it doesn't have the focus in this game. Talk about a bait and switch!

I've come to wonder, after reading the first few introductory lines for Joey, whether it's not Hauntswitch though, that would be quite something! That make for good material for the other game! A mysterious place, not just a mansion, to explore with Jude and Dammek. Maybe the town was originally called "Haunt's Witch" or something.

Anyway, the intro was every bit as delightful as I could hope.

And Joey's introduction every bit as Homestuck.

"SEMI-ORPHAN", though. :( Guess Grandpa really neglects his parental duties. "ASPIRING VETERINARIAN" :D Being good with animals is probably part of why Tesseract looks so well fed. And it'll help her on Alternia, no doubt. And even now, to know the monsters' weaknesses and how to perhaps passify them? Also, I wonder if "multiple" dance schools means she knows more than tap dance and ballet!

I love how the backgrounds come to live, it's just so good to look at them in the intended resolution! The music is so good, too. Really top notch job all around!

Eesh, I notice that using Alt+Tab to switch between Windows has the downside that Alt is also a key that forwards the dialogue...

I guess the laser backdrop from those teaser pictures, is just the default background for the playable character's icon!

Heheheh, the hint function is disabled for now. My bet is it's enabled as soon as you have the magnifying glass. "it won't any good" <- typo

OOOOOOOH!!! GOD YES!! Hiveswap supports multiple save files!! That. Is. A. Life saver. Saving just before a battle? Before combining Glowy Thing 1 with Sinister Crevass 2? Hell yes.

Hmm, something buggy about clicking on Joey's icon at this stage. The cursor turned into an iris, and I had to click the hint button to get it away.

Ooooh! Hell yes, the header can be minimized!!!

LOOKing at the calendar, it turns out the date is ACTUALLY NOVEMBER 11TH, 1994!! God dag nabbit! So, what, the monsters have something to do with Betty Crocker? Did Condy try something on 2x2 prong day in B1, it failed, and then she just thought to herself "needs more prongs" and did it again later in B2?

We can try to MARK the calendar, yet it's already got a cross for the date. Oh, heh, that just gives the same response. It's probably to keep us on our toes, since we can't be sure every command has a different outcome!

LOOKing at the ballet shoes, we learn about Joey's aspirations to create "Ballap", pfffff.

And, welp, guess Print Screen is also an action key.

EQUIPing the ballet shoes... We learn about ABILITECHS and TECHNICHES. Perfection. Goodbye SYLLADICES and SPECIBII! Say hello to the good old school technology of our youth. :P "In my day, we didn't have those newfangled SYLLADILLIES you youngsters swing about, oh no!"

LOOKing at the posters, Joey talks about how her posters talk to her in her dreams, talking about a better world past the stars. I doubt they mean Alternia. :P Also, dreams, eh? Even if she's not a Sburb players, her dreams could still be prophetic in a way.

Clicking on the light switch... Actually works, hahah! I thought for sure the power would be out right now!

Oh, so the eyeball was meant to go on the ceiling only, heh. And, the plush on the bed. N'awww, so Joey and Ms. Clair both worked on the ceiling. And she calls it a "mural", which of course reminds me of the ones in Problem Sleuth!

Oh, the oven near the closet was her birthday present "last year". I wonder what her birthday is. Seems like it's more of a children's oven, in that it probably doesn't produce edible cake, I think? (Welp @ her comment regarding not having a mom.)

And speaking of Moms!! The wizard globe is present from Mom! Or, well, Roxy, I guess she should be called. The B1 version. So she really IS Joey and Jude's babysitter. Or at the very least, she was until last year. Wait, no, it doesn't specify a year. Anyway, I guess this little corner of her room is full of presents she's received. Also, Roxy be Roxying.

Oooh, those books start Joey of on a BOOK REPORT she has to hand in! She goes to school! Or at least, has tutors. Pfff, Old Yeller reference for the win. "You kind of hate your teachers sometimes." Yeah, let's keep Tess nice and safe, shall we?

I like Blaperile's idea that Jude would take Dammek to school. Since they're probably going to be swapped for sometime, it just might happen. Imagining Dammek sitting in class, refusing to take off a high hat. Hmm, okay, but November 11th is a Friday apparently (dang American week day numbering system!) so it's probably not going to happen. I think 48 hours is more than enough time to swap them back.

Blaperile saw that November 11th was a holiday for America just like it is where we live, so that means Joey & Jude probably spent the whole day goofing around with Tess like we saw in the intro scene. Veterans Day, more like Aspiring Veterinarians Day, amirite?

---

So, first few steps in the game, taken. Save file location, found. (Can't hide from me, I'm a programmer!) Hype feelings, assuaged. :D

I'm captivated by what few things I've already seen, looking forward to the next!

For people eager to see me and Blaperile's gameplay reaction, strap on, it's going to be a long ride! (If you're wondering why we don't just film ourselves playing - English isn't our first language.)