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29pageshomestuckeveryday · 2 years ago

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Homestuck, page 2,628

Karkat: Troll this worthless human.

Author commentary:

Is there something incongruous, or emotionally dissonant, about the fact that this adorable, pajama-wearing Future John has his head sandwiched by a device emblazoned with the image of a grotesque rapist? Maybe I should change the subject. There's so much to talk about here, it would be a shame to get hung up on the sexual crimes of john's favorite celebrities. Anyway, this panel is a great and exciting way to get into the arc of A5A2. Just this single shot of Future John and a few points of dialogue tell us so much. Cool new outfit, plans are being hatched, everybody's friends now… It's a future-plot snapshot imbued with optimism and intrigue. It lets us know very swiftly what the ultimate narrative purpose of A5A2 is going to be: to bring us to this moment and reveal what happens along the way. Some of the energy from Hivebent's intense nonlinear storytelling patterns are carrying over to the next sub-act. A5A2 isn't quite as freewheeling as Hivebent in terms of "show literally anything, from any point on the timeline, literally any time," but it jumps around enough to keep things interesting and unpredictable.

The time-hopping here isn't purely narrative trickery, or me being whimsical by pointing the camera at whatever I want, whenever I want. There's a good in-story reason for scattering nonlinear focal points throughout A5A2. Which is that, unlike in the acts prior to Hivebent, now we have the luxury of seeing events from a troll point of view. And the trolls are all accessing human events through Trollian, which lets them bounce around the human timeline like maniacs. So we get to see what they see sometimes, which isn't necessarily the order in which we would be viewing things if we didn't have their POV at our disposal.

Because of the intriguing Future John pajama panel, I'm launching into some bigass paragraphs on storycraft. Frankly, since the last book, that's basically what this gutter has been used for. So be it. But in doing so, I'm almost missing the chance to reflect on this really epic screed that Karkat introduces himself to John with, which, as we now know, might as well be a love letter. John says he's not gay. I mean, sure, I guess he technically is "not a homosexual." But aside from that, who are we trying to kid? Everything going on here is really quite spectacularly gay. All of the trolls' involvement with the humans originates from one poorly thought-out, helplessly hate-smitten and gay overture made by a cranky teen boy. Karkat had this whole tirade bottled up inside, ready to unload, but because John is totally expecting it, and already knows Karkat well, he is able to completely disarm, flummox, and redirect all of the hostile energy. The ensuing backwards-chatting idiot spiral is a direct result of John affably and naively sabotaging Karkat's high-strung, breathlessly romantic overture. The lesson is clear: the entire Homestuck universe turns exclusively on the axis of of gay teen follies.

Everything John is saying here, his whole attitude, and lines like "oh god, the quadrants…" reflect the fact that he clearly knows considerably more about the trolls than he did when we last saw him. In other words, it's almost like he just got done with the onerous process of reading Hivebent, just like we did. And he probably has about the same take on most of that material as we do. In this story, the characters literally never stop behaving as stand-ins for the readers in various ways. This conversation winds down in the fairly predictable manner we've come to expect from Karkat, with his stubborn commitment to ongoing gestures of self-humiliation and outlandish insults. But then there's a curveball at the end. People really got a kick out of John's final line. But "soon," as we're going to gradually learn, is a pretty relative concept. Sometimes you need a lot of patience when waiting for stuff that's coming soon.

#gif #pesterlog

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cyvonix · 9 months ago

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Cyv Reads Homestuck - Act 6 Act 1 Wrapup

Already?

Yeah, after the beast that was Act 5 Act 2, which practically could've been its own whole webcomic by itself, I must say it feels pretty odd to go right back down to a normal length act and already be writing another wrapup. But here we are! I'm not gonna lie, I feel that I have less to say about this act by a long shot, but that's nothing against it. It's just that I think it served its purpose very well, which is to be almost 100% setup for the rest of Act 6. Pretty much everything that was done here, from introducing the new characters to showing us where John and Jade are to letting us hear the interactions between the rest of the trolls and kids were all in service of putting the pieces into place for what seems like the climax of the story to get started.

That being said, all three of those pieces above each have notable aspects to mention. The most obvious is that, well, we have a whole new cast of characters!!! The new four are already quite charming, and I like how they both play into and subvert what you'd expect from them based on what we know of the "Beta kids" as I've seen them referred to lol. I'm definitely interested to spend more time with them and learn more, and obviously extremely curious to know if the beta kids and these ones will actually meet or talk at some point, and how those interactions will end up. I do find that they currently feel more like caricatures than full characters, but I suppose this is to be expected, as the beta kids and the trolls both felt that way when they were introduced as well. So it's not necessarily a complaint, but more just a note of the whiplash produced after we've now had so much time to learn about our cast and develop the more three dimensional parts of their personalities, and then we're essentially thrust back into pre-Act 4 styles of characters. Again though, I do like them and am excited to see where they're taken in the story.

The other massive change is the dialogue, which really feels like it's been cracked wide open at this point. It was very notable how the dialogue between characters developed through each act, and to me, Hivebent was really the moment where Hussie officially shifted into a new mode of dialogue, which was kept and expanded upon in A5A2. Here, we finally get characters in the same, physical space as each other, talking under the pretense of their actual names. What this does is take what was so great about the dialogue before and let it breathe in ways it never could have. Because of the implied visual and spatial element of the conversations now, the dynamics between characters shine more than ever, and physical gestures and comedy can be used to such a greater extent than before. In any other comic, this would be the status quo and no big deal, but in Homestuck, where we've grown so accustomed to the characters being isolated for such a long time, there's something truly special and sweet about just getting to see them do something as simple as speak with each other in person.

And of course at the forefront of story changes is the fact that the meta elements have now been fully folded into the narrative of Homestuck itself. I wasn't sure if or how this would happen, but the way it has is really cool. Hussie's universe essentially being a gateway between sessions works on so many levels; as a potential commentary on the nature of storytelling itself, as an escalation of the cosmic mindfuckery that this story has reveled in up to this point, and even just as a fun, visually interesting device. This change makes it almost feel like we're playing with a bunch of little playsets, the characters being paper dolls that we can transpose between the sets and mismatch in whatever way we'd like. In this way, the story has truly given itself free reign to do whatever it wants to, honestly.

And I think that's just about my thoughts on this act. I would say it's much less dense than the past few, but again, I think as an introduction to the new status quo and setup for things to come, it works very well. As long as the story keeps its momentum, I believe the wheels will get rolling back at their previous speed pretty quickly. So, to close, some final observations and questions that were raised or remain unanswered by this act:

Lord English himself was nowhere to be seen, which is... almost worrying. I keep waiting for the moment he pops into the story and inevitably makes everything go to absolute hell

But SPEAKING of Lord English, Jake's whole thing is ????? Obviously his last name is English, which feels like it's purposefully dangling the answer right in front of my face without actually telling me. AGH! Is Jake Lord English? Is it somehow this universe's John? Will he create Lord English? It could be so many things and I don't have enough right now to make any judgement calls.

Also concerning Jake, why are there lusi on his island?!? This is absolutely bizarre to me and I can't begin to come up with what convoluted series of events led to either these things from Alternia ended up on Earth, or these things from Earth ended up on Alternia, or knowing Hussie, some secret third thing.

I'm wondering how the travel time thing is going to be handled, both in a narrative perspective and from a real life historical standpoint. The characters are talking about destinations that will take them multiple years to reach, and I wonder if this will actually be the case or if there will be some plot device to let these journeys be sped up. If not, I guess we'll be looking at an actual time skip? Man, this thing really is just a shounen now. But from the real life perspective, I'm wondering if this actually was going to take place over the next couple years and the dialogue was a nod to that, or if it's a time constraint purely contained within the narrative.

#cyv reads homestuck #cyv reads homestuck wrapups #act 6-1 #act 6 act 1 #act 6 intermission 1 #homestuck #homestuck liveblog #homestuck spoilers

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hsblitzed · 4 years ago

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AAAA ITS ONLY DAY 20 AND I ALMOST FORGOT. but its okay. i’m here and i’m gonna READ.