#oh and the K in Clark’s middle name is literally just the letter K

[little-pondhead]

Clockwork sneezed.

Then he paused. He never sneezes. He’s a ghost; ghosts don’t get sick. Not since he locked up the last Ghost Virus in his vaults. Why did he sneeze?

He sneezed again. Oh no, was that a headache coming on? His eyes felt tired and his skin was itchy. Was that a tickle in his throat?? Were those spots on his arm?? Shit, time to go check on his vaults to make sure nothing escaped. All hell would break loose if there was a ghost epidemic again.

Clockwork turns to leave the room, and in his haste, his scepter taps the very edge of a tall and thin grandfather clock he’d just been working on. The clock was made from a red-stained cottonwood he’d procured from the heart of Kansas many years ago, and it was gilded in delicate gold that shone with age and looked well-loved. Despite its height, the clock was a strong one, and didn’t tip over when the Ghost of Time bumped it.

It did, however, shift a few of the loose cogwheels inside. A few of them dropped out of the clock, and one even fell to the floor and rolled away. The ones that stayed inside rattled ominously for a moment before settling into their new spots. The clock kept ticking, but the time was off now. It skipped a few seconds, just enough for a listener to notice, before suddenly reversing the hour and minute hands.

Too bad there was nobody nearby to pay attention to the now-broken clock.

—

Danny was a strange boy. He knew that. Everyone in Amity knew that. Even his mentor, Clockwork, called him strange every once in a while. He liked being strange. It was fun being unpredictable. Having a Time Medallion stuck in his chest certainly helped in his shenanigans, since it meant he was technically separate from the time streams. He had pulled off more than one prank on his pseudo-grandfather by using this to his advantage.

Sometimes, however, Danny’s freedom from the time stream caused him more trouble than he thought it was worth. Like right now, for example.

He was simply at home, battling dinner with his sister while his parents were making a batch of fudge. Suddenly, Danny felt the time stream shift and writhe in a way he’d never felt before. He shivered and sneezed, thinking nothing of it. Clockwork made tiny adjustments all the time, there was nothing to worry about.

Except there was. When he opened his eyes, there was now a baby in his house.

One minute it was just him and Jazz at the table, the next, a baby in a red high chair was giggling and clapping along with Jazz as she tried to cut up the double-dead hotdogs into smaller bits for the child to eat.

The baby wasn’t a ghost, Danny knew. But when he looked around, evidence of a baby living in the Fenton house laid everywhere. The rocking chair in the living room now had a side table with two empty bottles on it. Pictures hanging in the hall had been changed to include the child. Toys were scattered around every corner, just waiting to be stepped on. Neither Jazz nor his parents had blinked at the sudden change.

In fact, Danny discovered, everyone in Amity Park seemed to think that this baby had always been with them. Even his best friends and rogues didn’t bat an eye! Danny was now a middle child, while everything else stayed the same.

But Danny knew. He knew something was wrong. This baby didn’t belong here.

He had to talk to Clockwork. He had to find out who this child was.

The child named Clark K. Fenton.

[momestuck]

Let’s read Hiveswap Friendsim - volume 10!

We’re over the halfway mark. Nineteen friends. This time, Of Faraway Lands and Nearby Pals.

Our trolls are going to be...

These two.

Incidentally, I haven’t commented, but every troll select screen has a different drawing when you mouseover the troll. Usually they’re just the same troll with a light shining on them, looking more enthusiastic, but you gotta see Tegiri’s one...

In addition to the Jojo-like art style, that’s the katakana character ゴ ‘go’ repeated. For some reason, katakana is commonly used over hiragana for sound effects in manga, such as laughter. So yeah. We’ve finally found the mall katana guy mentioned waaaaay back in Polypa’s route!

Oddly, while ���Tegiri’ would be valid romaji (although not, I checked, on lists of Japanese names I could find... I wouldn’t want to guess at a pseudo-’translation’, there’s a few possibilities), ‘Kalbur’ is decidedly not, and would be turned into something like ‘karuburu’ if it was transliterated into Japanese. That might be significant...

But that’s as far as my rudimentary Japanese knowledge can take me. We’ll come back to Tegiri shortly. First of all, it’s...

...beloved The Magic Roundabout character, Zebedee!

I really hope that’s not a coincidence.

Zebede

Zebede is the third and final troll by Magdalena Clarke, author of Vikare and Elwurd. Well, I enjoyed Elwurd, so that’s a good sign... hopefully...

This begins with getting a chittr notification. God, push notifications, am I right?

The name suggests we’re going to deal with the bees that made Sollux’s ‘mind honey’, granting goldbloods fantastic powers. (The game seems to have decisively chosen ‘gold’ rather than ‘yellow’, so I will defer to this.)

Who is this new friend? It seems to be someone who knows Cirava...

Their speech quirk seems to be using z in place of s, but not always.

Zebede invites us to download a video chat app...

Surprisingly, this does not result in our phone getting inducted into a botnet. Apparently the app we downloaded is called ‘grype’.

It’s weird to have so many Skype jokes given that Skype has pretty much given way to other messaging apps, at least in my experience...

He’s really excited to hear about how we know Cirava, and we tell him. He lets on rather unsubtly that he’s lonely and would appreciate a visit. Apparently he lives a long way out, for the sake of the bees.

We get our first choice...

Honestly no idea which one is the instant death option here. Probably asking if it’s really fine, but the ways we die are so random in this game, who knows?

Let’s go with asking where he lives.

We mention we went out to visit Skylla in the countryside, which leads him to... more self-deprecation. Wow, this guy sure is insecure.

And he decides like... we’re not really interested in visiting him. ‘A wall has been raised’, as the game puts it.

Dude, no wonder you don’t have friends.

OK, well, that was a short branch. Let’s try asking about his living situation and his lusus, whether it’s really fine.

Ah yes, play on his feelings of resentment. Get him to complain and wheedle in that way. That’s our narrator.

This guy’s face is so... pointy... I don’t have much commentary to add.

This leads us to a non-choice of saying we’ll go visit him immediately. This seems like a really healthy, non-manipulative friendship we’ve got going on here.

Apparently Zebede’s got some of whatever concentrated loneliness and fetishisation of friendship our narrator is suffering.

The narrator goes through a few friends to try and figure out who to get a lift from... and after rejecting Tagora, Amisia, Zebruh (oh god no), taxis and public transport, they decide the only option is to do crimes. Hey, I can get behind it.

By crimes they mean, finding an unlocked car and nicking it. Unlike Konyyl, they can’t punch locks off.

Apparently we know how to turn on the auto-pilot in a troll car. Not sure when we figured that one out!

Fittingly, Zebede’s hive is full of bees.

Inside, too, it’s a nice rustic bee farm.

We get a text message from... Cirava, it turns out. I wonder what they want...

We have the choice of ignoring it or letting it go to voicemail. Wow, we’re getting a lot of phone calls in this episode! Let’s try chatting with Cirava, maybe we can invite them over and all chill here...

It’s nice to see Cirava again. The protagonist’s weird obsession with collecting more friends instead of spending time with the ones they’ve made is highlighted...

What’s up with that?

The matter of Cirava’s clothes comes up.

Oh right so that’s what happened to Cirava’s clothes... I honestly forgot.

Anyway, Cirava’s a little worried when we say we’re hanging out with Zebede, who they know by chittr handle if not by name. They are worried that we’re tight, and we say we’re working on it.

Called out!

Anyway, Cirava warns us about getting too close to Zebede, and links... his fanfiction. OK, sure. It turns out to be... RPF. Of Cirava.

Oh dear, we’re gonna get into the RPF discourse in this episode, huh? That is something I generally want to stay a long way away from.

Anyway, Zebede comes back while we’re reading one of his fics.

That sure is an expression.

Anyway, when we explain that Cirava linked this, Zebede decides we’re not prioritising him after all, and clearly Cirava is more important than him.

I’m really not sure we want to be this guy’s friend.

He breaks down crying at the perceived slight of mentioning that we have other friends.

The protagonist starts feeling like a dick. There’s a poke at the blurry line between inner monologue and spoken dialogue on the protagonist’s part...

But anyway, that’s that for Zebede’s route.

So, how do we actually befriend this guy? Trick seems to be to pretend we care about literally nothing other than him, I guess. So let’s go back and ignore Cirava’s grype call.

Instead of answering the call, we work on our chittr profile. God, that’s hard enough irl, let alone when you’re on an alien planet...

So, we assure Zebede that we weren’t about to take a call in the middle of a hang sesh, and he starts showing us some pirate films. Then, switches to space pirate films. Poor guy’s really thrown for a loop by our indecisiveness.

The narrator is sympathetic, but unhelpful. Honestly narrator, just pick something. Fake some enthusiasm. If you really want to be friends with this kid...

We suggest watching the last thing he watched on grubtube. Which... seems like a shitty suggestion to me, since like, if it’s the last thing you watched...

But to Zebede, that seems to be something much worse.

You promise you absolutely won’t judge him. We may regret this.

Mostly, it turns out to be videos of Cirava. Yeah, we get it, he’s got a crush.

He shows us some music videos of a group called hatched2dance. I’m guessing this is a KPop (or perhaps JPop) parody, especially given the whole RPF angle...

Honestly like I probably couldn’t stand this guy in real life but I have some sympathies for his whole awkward gay teenager reading fic thing.

Anyway, seeing themselves reflected in Zebede prompts some reflection in the narrator.

The narrator has kind of a freakout on realising how offputting they’ve been - that they’ve been ‘a big phony’.

We’re saved from an existential crisis by someone showing up to reclaim their scuttlebuggy.

The narrator decides they should probably go out and face the music before this troll carves their way into the hive. This wins over Zebede even harder.

We learn that Zebede’s psychic power is... controlling bees. Using the bees, they drive off the troll outside.

And so we chill with Zebede, and the protagonist takes notes on ‘not being such a desperate piece of shit’.

We’ll see if this whole change of heart actually lasts.

The Alternian text in the picture says ‘ALTERNIA K-POP ALL-STARS’ in the Hiveswap version of the alphabet. Just in case you had any doubt what videos he’s into.

Tegiri

And now... time for things to get anime. This is the debut of David Turnbull.

The protagonist notices the edges of sunrise, and concludes they need to make a friend before daybreak. At that moment, someone accosts them.

Tegiri also gets chiptunes, in common with our other anime troll. I think it’s a remix of one of the tracks elsewhere in Homestuck. But it could easily fit in with a genuine 8-bit game.

Reassuringly, Tegiri concludes that since we’re an alien not a troll, he doesn’t have to cull us.

His typing quirk is that he replaces the letter ‘L’ with slashes.

And his character trait is, sure enough...

HUGE WEEB. Though, glass houses, stones, etc....

Naturally, the initial instant death choice is...

Unusually, we get three choices.

I can assert with 100% confidence that if I click anything other than ‘subs’, I will be executed by katana. So let’s try... both are good.

He casts us out for our indecisiveness.

The Alternian text here reads ‘PATHETIC.’ The drawing here recalls a particular anime meme... after some digging I was able to identify it as a screencap of Asuka from eva:

Think this is probably from End of Evangelion? But I can’t really recall.

...god I’m not helping my case for not being as much a weeb as Tegiri here, am I?

OK, let’s try subs now.

...lol, I’m wrong. He prefers dubs. What kind of weeb is this guy?

However, even though we’re wrong on the Most Important Question, we get to come back to his hive.

We can see body pillows around his recuperacoon, an improbable number of katanas, a bunch of figurines... the text above his bed says OPPAI, which is, well... Japanese for boobs. Yeah.

If you look closely at the anime figurines, I’m sure you can identify a few.

But except for Luffy in top right, I’m not sure about the rest. Someone who knows more about anime, feel free to fill me in. Bottom right might be a machine lifeform from NieR Automata, but that seems too recent, and wouldn’t 2B be a more in-character one for him to have?

Anyway...

I like how this casually assumes that the reader knows what an otaku is, but then again who reads Homestuck without knowing that I guess.

The narration says Tegiri has sorted his merch by blood colour, which is like... contradicted by the illustration which clearly has a bronzeblood troll at the top, but who cares I guess.

This guy is just too quotable lol.

Anyway, we get to meet a lusus again. This time, the lusus is actually drawn, not just a filtered stock photo!

It’s also mildly terrifying :D

It’s called Tadashi Inu, which means... well it kind of doesn’t mean anything (‘however dog’???), but if it was Tadashii Inu, it would mean Correct Dog.

Anyway, naturally what does an anime club do but watch anime?

He’s presently in the middle of watching ‘Philosopher’s Half-Iron’, which I’m guessing is a joke about Fullmetal Alchemist? Instead, he proposes Schoolfed Heroism (BNHA maybe?) and Kismet:Stuck Morning (no guesses for this one... I’m a fake weeb).

It’s also interesting that we’re watching on DVDs. If they wanted to go full weeb, they could put in fansub jokes here... but then this guy prefers dubs to subs, so maybe he likes to buy official releases.

Naturally, we run into translation issues.

He wanted the first edition and ‘paid extra for it’. So rather than enjoy the rest of the episode, we set off to have a word with the importer...

I have to ask... how does the troll economy work? There’s hints at a capitalist economy, money is mentioned and we had the guy running the club just now, but none of the trolls seem to have jobs. They seem to just get issued money according to their blood colour?

Speaking of which, we get some comments on troll retail...

So yeah, we’re gonna find another weeb I guess.

If that’s the billboard in the background, it's too small and blurry to work out what it says, unfortunately.

He seems pretty opposed to any ‘rebel sentiments’. Which of course he discusses with the weebiest metaphors. Alternia balances on...

He goes on about katanas for a while, like he’s going down a checklist of orientalist tropes. Naturally it’s a prelude to a challenge to ‘dance’.

We say swords are cool and this gets a little rant about bushido. You know, that self-serving horseshit some guy in the late 1800s fabricated as nationalist mythology...

We arrive at the anime store.

More text to transcribe, oh joy. At the top of the store it says the name of the shop, mentioned in dialogue, ‘SUPER TOPATO IMPORTS’. Above the door behind the counter it says ‘EMPLOYEES ONLY’.  On the bookshelf full of manga it says something too squished to easily read.

Anyway, we’re having a look around, but Tegiri starts kicking up a stink.

It’s basically the navy seal copypasta, slightly modified to be more trollish.

Meanwhile we’ve accidentally knocked some anime and manga out of someone’s hand.

Still not getting these references, unfortunately.

The troll with a pink sign is apparently against troll law - ‘depiction of nonstandard hemological attributes’.

This is all going over my head at this point. The references, I mean. Obviously the text - that Tegiri is an entitled douchebag - is clear enough.

Oh, this one I get - Ace Attorney, of course.

Anyway, this is where we get a choice. Do we stop Tegiri straight up murdering someone for peddling the wrong kind of anime?

Obviously we will try. Even though this seems like a great way to end up dead ourselves.

We speak up for the shopkeeper, and manage to convince Tegiri not to straight-up kill him. This leads to... a story, of a previous time he showed mercy, in contradiction to the law.

Of course, we know who this baby - who should have been culled for lacking a lusus, by troll law - would have been. God, I’d sure rather be hanging out with Polypa than this guy.

The narrator, of course, has one thing on their mind...

We suggest that the law, and what is right, are maybe not the same thing...?

The hard decisions such as ‘do I murder this baby?’

The narrator decides they know something about bad ways to manage loneliness...

The narrator manages to divert his rant by asking about his eyes. Which are... any guesses? Contact lenses. For cosplay.

Before we can make the error of accusing him of breaking the law by cosplaying a nonexistent blood caste, who should show up but...

Oh thank god. Save us, Polypa.

Of course he says 何 nani instead of ‘what’. And as for 後輩 kōhai, that’s basically the counterpart to senpai, the junior partner in an informal hierarchy within an organisation, dictating the use of certain honorifics. If my reading of the wiki article is right, he’s using it quite incorrectly.

Polypa lets on that we’re moirails. This causes Tegiri to be a little taken aback. The narration has some fun.

Tegiri claims - despite his huge stack of body pillows and figurines - that he has no time for quadrants.

‘Were it not for the laws of this land’ is most commonly associated with a meme from a Ghanaian film, not anime, but the sentiment surely fits.

Polypa tries to talk some sense into him.

So we end up doing an anime sleepover...

The dog is saying ワンワン (wanwan), which is standard Japanese onomatopoeia for a dog barking.

The text in this screen says... ‘Ore wa kaizoku-ou ni naru otoko da!’, which is a One Piece reference, meaning ‘I'm the man who will be the pirate king!’.

So, Tegiri may be insufferable, but at least with Polypa around we can keep him more or less under control.

There’s a few more options to explore. What if we’d picked dubs, not subs, near the start? He praises our choice, but otherwise, the story proceeds in the same way. I think that’s actually the first time we’ve had branches merge.

Now, what if we let him kill the shopkeeper?

Shockingly, he’s not as much a swordsman as he makes out. And the shopkeeper, it turns out, is psychic, and zaps him before legging it.

I was under the impression that psychic abilities were rare in goldbloods, but what do I know?

We ask like... was that really necessary?

Well, he’s certainly a tool, he got that part right. (Sorry.)

We go to report the shopkeeper’s terrible crimes to the drone, but unfortunately... it seems that the protagonist has a rap sheet themselves!

They can’t pin it on us! We’re innocent!

God, the ‘everything happened’ approach to continuity is still fucking with me. Did we make friends with Remele? Did we not? Earlier, the narration mentioned making ‘between 1 and 19′ friends. What if someone didn’t obsessively explore and replay every branch? They’d be so confused!

But despite his ineptitude with a sword, our attempted escape over an overpass leaves us...

Dead.

I’m sure this shot is also an allusion to an anime meme, but I can’t say which one, so yeah.

That’s Zebede and Tegiri. Not the best friends we’ve made, but I enjoyed the chance to be a huggggeee neeeerrrd in this post. (>implying that I could be anything other than a huge nerd on my homestuck liveread blog)