#i love a movie that deep dives into 1 character. and jodie foster is a great actor and did so good in the role

[homestuckreplay]

john's movies GOOD?!?!

Homestuck is 1 month old today! Sadly we didn't get an update to celebrate, but there's still so much to puzzle over with Sburb that I'm okay with it. Plus I watched Contact last night, and I'm canceling the narrator for claiming that John likes 'really terrible movies' because this movie kicks so much ass. I don't care if John only likes it because he thinks Matthew McConnaughey is pretty, this rules, I want to stop here and watch this one six more times.

In this movie, we get a cool scientist who's really good at her job and could easily have a successful career, turn away from that to focus on a fringe project searching for aliens, despite constant criticism and loss of funding. Eventually she succeeds, proves that aliens are real like it's no big deal, and is recognized by her work enough to be the first human sent to greet alien life. Only, since she can't prove that she actually met aliens or even left the planet, scientific opinion turns against her once more, despite her certainty that the contact did happen.

Now if we extrapolate this to John and Sburb, we could see a similar arc. He and TT are probably going to have some weird ass experiences playing this game. Something we don't know yet is how the game reacts to non-players - 'You just hope he doesn't notice the MAGIC CHEST on the roof' (p.143) is the only nod we get. What if the environment is only changed for the players, and the changes simply don't exist for Dad? What if they're technically living in different versions of the same house now, and John has to try and prove that TT is actually changing his environment? That could make for a weird story that deals a lot with object interactions, the same way the early pages did.

This movie's primary theme is science vs religion and faith vs proof, and the situations in which those aren't so different. I think we're already seeing this in Homestuck via the chumhandles, with John and TT being connected to science ('biologist' and 'therapist' respectively) while TG and GG are associated with faith ('godhead' and 'gnostic'). Maybe we'll get to see TG and GG play Sburb together and have a completely different gameplay experience to John's with TT, and we'll be able to compare and contrast the ways that they alter their environment.

I know family is a really common theme in movies, so I'm curious. If you randomly selected any five movies from, say, 1985-2000, what are the chances that parent-child relationships would be a driving plot force in all five? How meaningful is it that this keeps reoccurring? And from which Egbert's perspective do we see Ellie's relationship with her dad from? Is this John wishing he was like Ellie, and that his dad encouraged his interests more instead of trying to force clowns and cakes onto him? Or is this Dad trying to let John know that he does support him, that he'll get John movie posters and help him buy memorabilia for his friends and participate in John's love of pranks?

I am going to be so john egbertcoded and get a poster of this movie for my room too.

VIES WATCHED: 5/11

MOST RECENT MOVIE: Contact (1997) - Rating 9/10