#they made her PQ route either

[redshcdes-archived]

honestly post-canon homestuck has given me ONE good thing and that was Terezi’s PQ sprites with her having a big stomach and hips and a tiny chest/bust like BABY THAT’S ME!

THIS TEREZI WAS MADE FOR ME!!

[tomatograter]

What are your Thots on jake’s pq route?

I already wrote some about it in this post where I discuss the problem with taking dirkjake as a literal parallel to tavris (Mainly, that it’s inaccurate to both situations and misrepresents the dynamics at play) but it’s been long enough since release that I feel like I can talk about it without that criticism being taken as a personal witch hunt. TL;DR: As a general rule of thumb I don’t cite Jake’s PQ as part of his characterization, and I think basing your Jakewriting on it will only lead you astray.

I liked a lot of the Pesterquest routes and the alphas were among some of my favorites, but I think when you play the four of them in sequence Jake’s really... stands as the odd one out. It’s almost as if he’s afforded way less sympathy from the get go for some indiscernible reason, or like MSPAR took a day to say ‘I can’t stand this kid in particular’ after dealing with waaaaaaaay more mindboggling troll customs or stupid dangerous situations that tested their patience and their limits. When it comes down to it, it’s mostly an issue of framing.

Let’s go with the “Just the Alpha routes” example, because I think that makes the overall context clearer and the response/reactions it gathered (or the lack thereof) easier to understand. The alpha kids were the last 4 Pesterquest episodes. They were also afforded entire volumes just for themselves, which cemented our expectations on “oh, they’re going to really dig into unexplored territory!” and for the most part, that’s what we got! It was really nice to see the internal mechanics of Jane as someone raised within a corporate echochamber, Roxy as a grieving, isolated kid, deprived of all human contact, and Dirk as a nerdy doomsday prepper haunted by private flashes of himself as a supervillain. It all works! Those are things the alpha kids were dealing with on the background of the broader Homestuck story, things we were only hinted at as the *larger* problems played out. It makes you understand their point of view. Except on Jake's route, where nothing about his life seems to be relevant at all? 

With Jane we get discussions about HIC and her family, with Roxy beautiful passages about a mother they never met and growing up alone— Same for Dirk, who gets a whole brother zapped from an alternate timeline. But on Jake's route there's not even an expansive dialogue path dedicated to Grandma English, Skaianet, the rebellion, or the giant red ship that came and murdered her in the night and then bombed his house, leaving him trapped inside his only surviving tower. No understanding passage realizing that this kid has had to fend for himself in an island full of Actual Giant Alien Monsters trying to eat him alive, or that he cremated his guardian specifically to avoid attracting predators to the scent of fresh blood drying on her mutilated corpse at the age of an actual toddler. The text refuses to dig into any of the psychological implications or impact an environment like this could have on a kid, which is even weirder when you consider MSPAR has met and helped Vriska get out of a similar situation. The whole thing with Jane in the previous volume has just happened, even, while Jake's particularities go unremarked. He was just supposed to deal with it. And that's because a choice was made to portray all of Jake's problems in this route as sort of... single handedly Dirk's fault? Something he should have Just Dealt with?

There's not even a hint that Jake knows Hal exists. Which is important! Jake can pick out Hal from Dirk based on *verbal cues*, and the fact that he considers Hal a barrier between him and his "real friend" getting to communicate with one another is a whole point of contention (and even comedy) in the story proper. Instead of examining Jake's isolation, or grief, or how he literally locks himself in his room and plasters it with cinematic posters to pretend he's just the main lead of a wacky adventure movie in the face of the immense shitshow outside, we get brobot acting nonsensically and threatening to break into Jake's room to beat him up. 

A general reminder on brobot: He was programmed to scout the jungle and deal with predators so Jake could a) Be allowed to safely leave his room (something he simply didn't do before age 13 out of sheer terror, and we know this because dirk and jake talk about it on his birthday conversation, when he first gets brobot) and 

b) Learn how to defend himself in the case of a surprise attack, with different combat settings adjusted to his level. The brobot has a novice mode Jake feels patronized by, but pushes him up levels quickly enough. In Homestuck proper, the brobot only enters "stalking mode" after Hal gets pissy with Jake for finding him out, and forcefully switches the setting on to make Jake work for the Uranium inside it. When you take Hal out of the picture, this plotline makes no sense! Jake's route is set way before the Alphas even think of entering the game, so this particular event hasn't even happened. Jake goes on to text Roxy and she turns the stalking setting off remotely anyways, so even if brobot was programmed to murder Jake in his sleep, or jump him inside the safe zone of his room (he's not) he has literally no reason to be acting like that when he's been set to Baby Buff Up Mode.

(Brobot does end up spontaneously pulling himself apart to give Jake his reward after this)

Which brings me to my other problem with the general framing of this volume; the alpha kids don't feel present in Jake's life as friends at all. It's all "romantic options" and "shipping discourse" and MSPAR making these silly logic jumps to justify insisting on this line of query, and all it does is completely flatten out anything of interest having to do with Jake as a Person, to build up an image of Dirk as being suspicious and shady for his volume and more or less come to the conclusion that Jake sucks because he just Cant Choose Who To Date Between All His Friends! And that's why jake is just like tavros… and dirk is just like vriska! Or something. 

And just as a reminder, here's Jake talking with Roxy so I don't have to explain why that feels like a weird choice to me. (click to zoom)

And then there's the endings. On the vriska ending, MSPAR just ends up weirdly angry at jake for being such a piss baby and not getting that he's tavros and dirk is vriska so he had to… uh… take all his anger out on this 13 year old alien girl he has never met and teach her a lesson to prepare to do the same on dirk, or something. And on the other ending Jake mentions his pen pal, is zapped to meet jade, they have some non-committal greetings and then a cosplay party where Jake insists that he totally likes Lara croft not because she's a femme fatale and he relates to that, because he's never ever in his life thought of anyone being interested on him. Or Something. He likes Lara croft for normal reasons only. He wears really tiny shorts and does sexy poses because he's not aware at all of how other people find him attractive. He's just too dumb to get this, or the shipping thing, or that he's tavros and Dirk is vriska (who the hell are these people?).

Jake feels like an afterthought in the grand scope of events. Sidelined on his own episode. This volume is busy with rehashing age old fandom arguments that have little to do with his character, because said arguments were started and maintained by bored teens engrossed on fighting online instead of analyzing Homestuck; we introduce vriska for no interesting reason at all (thank god at least Jake has enough decency to say he's not into hitting on 13-year-olds, because that would have been particularly rancid.) And aside from catchphrases and old slang sprinkled liberally into his dialogue like a fog making machine, none of the motivation for the character is there. What does he want? What does he fear? Why does he act like the way he does? What would accommodating him look like? What would helping him look like? We get this on Jane's volume, Roxy's volume, and Dirk's volume. To really heart-wrenching and dramatic results, too. You get to know who they are, where they live, what they want, what they fear, what might help them get better, but Jake is just sort of There. He's a burden. MSPAR either ends this volume berating him for not doing what they want or finding him weird and confusing and like they don't know each other at all, and the fact both of those were marked as dubiously bad ends in the game files speaks for itself, I think.

[thedetectiveofinaba]

Blog Update: Verse tweaking & updating setups on main verse timeline

1. PQ and PQ2 verses - or lack of them

Due to my lack of interest and knowledge about the aforementioned games I don’t feel like writing either of them in any scenario. I’m dropping all plans on both verses & their main information from the “main storyline” verse list will be deleted.

If I ever decide to write PQ2 threads again, they will be focused on Naoto’s POV in her being a member of the Phantom Thieves at P5 or P5 AU setting and the P4!timeline Naoto will be closer to a side muse mentioned occasionally.

2. P4A and P4AU verse specifications & split up versions for people who don’t know information about them/care about them

I’m currently planning to catch up on P4 Arena and watch the main storyline routes which mainly concern Naoto (aka her route and Yosuke’s route, concerning how P4A manga made it “canon”) and the storyline for P4 Arena Ultimax. The setup on my Naoto is that unless plotted otherwise events taking place during P4A are from Yosuke’s POV Route. (I might do a deeper hc post on that later but my main reason for this is that she’s more interested in finishing her job assignmnent than fighting a bunch of people in a Battle Royale scenario + doesn’t want to hurt her teammates if she can have a peaceful solution. That, and she has enough nightmares to deal with.)

An alternative for a post-game setup which ignores the existence of all spin offs (aka P4A, P4AU and P4DAN) will also exist & it's the main one I'll be using. They will have same base tag.

[skips-is-asleep]

Yeah for sure they were extremely meaningful to one another and its for ambiguous by nature (as seen by how Mspa Reader talks about them in Solluxs pesterquest "girlfriend? Best friend?") And i also agree that he as a valid reason for being mean to her and talking/behaving the way he did.

I think its pretty obvious he wouldnt be down for that happening to her, especially by EQUIUS of all people (im dont doubt aradia probably complained about him being super creepy before she died and thus sollux already had a pretty solid opinion of him) im just a little disappointed we didnt get to SEE any of it.

I wish we could've seen maybe talking about how seeing his best friend/matesprite/moirail/whatever reanimated as a robot with artificial feelings for a dude she DEFINITELY didn't like when she was alive may have reopened new wounds for him.

Like, its unclear how much time has passed since aradias death and its implied that youre helping Sollux come to terms with and finish his grieving by the time his PQ arc comes out. (And aradia doesnt tell us anything about this either in hers, go figure)

So maybe he feels guilty? Maybe sad that hes being reminded that someone who is unambiguously precious to him is gone forever and this is all he has left as far as he knows? Maybe hes mad that equius even made Aradiabot at all? Maybe all three??

I just wish hussie cared enough about these two to put more exploration into them. I wouldve loved even a shrivel of logs or dialogue between them. (I also wish we could've see more of ARADIA showing her fondness of Sollux like hes shown for her. There's lots of them talking when aradia is DEAD or a ROBOT but its made clear that those versions of her are pretty off from the Alive Version. Like i remember the dialogue of them talking in a dream bubble after sollux goes blind which was a time of High Stress for both of them and also exposition about dream bubbles, and then its back to main character plot stuff. I dont even think his name is brought up in her PQ route, but i get it, she was dead most of the comic and had shit to do when she wasn't dead, but im seriously digressing)

Wondering if equius ever showed aradiabot to sollux before the events of the comic and maybe how far he was in the project

“Hey sollux i know youre horrible lowblood trash whomst is beneath me but I have been made aware that you were very close to aradia. Would you like to see her reanimated robot self that i have injected with my own fluids.”

I kinda have vague memories of aradiabot being a secret? (Ive been wrong about remembering shit in the comic before tho) so I wonder what his first reaction was to seeing her like that. I recently reread some of their interactions and sollux was just generally much more bitter and mean, even kanaya commented on it, saying he used to talk more, and obvi he was pretty mean to aradiabot too, even saying she wasnt capable of feeling anything when she was trying to say goodbye to him :“”“”“(

Their relationship is real cute and sweet and kind of fascinating and i wish they weren’t SUCH side characters

[sillyfudgemonkeys]

if there was a p3p manga adaption of the femc route whould you like the femc from the game or her have an independently personality like shoji from the p4 manga?

Sorry for late response, had to think about it (and the post gets long cause I have to work through my thought process sorry ;w; but if you don’t want to bother with that go to the very end with the tldr; 8U). Hmmmm tbh I thought that Minato, Makoto, and Souji (still salty they spelt it differently in the US release >.>), and I guess Anime!Yu (both original and golden, to an extent), and even their Drama CD/Stage play counterparts (note I only know a little about these) reflected the game MCs in ways that reflect certain choices you can make (so like they’re personalities can all be sourced from the game but the media chooses to only focus on select personality traits). Like:

(under the cut cause length my bad)

P3 Male MC:

Minato: reflects the laid back choices, doesn’t really talk unless spoken to

Makoto: Originally reflects the asshole options before getting character development that gives him more humble personality (he was originally going to be more of an asshole but they felt no one would like him and I say it could’ve worked tbh). 

DramaCD: Weird mixture of the above, He’s aloof and will be a little sarcastic, but he’s also laid back.

Sakuya Shiomi (stage plays): tbh I can’t really say considering they aren’t subbed, but he comes off as similar to the Drama CD (his facial expressions remind me of Movie1!Makoto tho)

P4MC (I will paraphrase Souji/Original Anime!Yu as someone already did this more in depth, but there’s the link I recommend reading it):

Souji: (his personality reflects a lot of how I play the game haha) He mature but has insecurities, he’s serious, professional, cool and independent, but can also joke around. He’s also a manly man (how some people view him) who is also very motherly (and fatherly). So he reflects those choices in game (ngl Souji and FeMC had a lot more vast personality choices than P3Male)

Original Anime!Yu: Socially awkward, very prone to his loneliness, he’s more the joking choices (but his are treated more of “Oh he’s being weird again” than with Souji it’s like “haha look at this cool dude crackin’ jokes! XD”) 

Golden!Yu: More confident person of OA!Yu, I think has some aspects of Souji in him (but that could be more because he’s more confident cause it’s an NG+ for him). (I won’t lie I didn’t finish this anime so hard to judge). I dunno how to explain it, I guess it’s if OA!Yu tried to act like Souji?

Arena/Ultimax/PQ!Yu/MC: Despite the name he’s actually more like Souji’s personality. 

Drama CD: From what I sped read for this, he’s more like Souji again.

Stage plays: Same as Souji from what I could tell (again don’t really know his personality that well).

So if I’m being honest, I’m a fan of Souji’s (and also means game!Yu) adaptation of the P4MC, and with P3…..I…kinda like Makoto more (I like Minato’s name more tho)….it might be because I hold a soft spot for asshole!P3MCs (which I’ll get to in a bit) like with Movie1!Makoto. 

Now for FeMC. Well P4MC had a lot more personality choices than P3MC (I mean their only options were “decent/nice comment” “…./silence” was “asshole response” 8U), and the same can be said for FeMC. She has a very broad personality setting ranging from hyper, to happy, to sad, to silence, to angry, to sarcastic and/or asshole, to serious, to overwhelmingly positive (aka Maya-like), to “I will cut a binch.” That’s….much broader than P3MC’s 3 options tbh (ok to be fair he kinda has a 4th one and it’s “just tell the person what they want to hear” which can sometimes-usually fall under the original 3 tho 8U). There is one general consensus with her is that she has been known for being a stepford smiler to some (which if she ever gets an adaptation, would really be a great thing to explore. It feels like it sets her positivity apart from Maya). But from media we have gotten from her….

FeMC:

Anthology comics: (I know I didn’t include this for P3/4MCs, fight me) Depending on the story/artist they’ll heavily cover each of said personality options listed above. Tho interpretations that stand out a lot is “too pure for this world” and “cracks (bad) jokes” (and sometimes “is very perverted,” which tbh I’m always down for perverted FemC 8U)

Drama CD: Is upbeat and nice and will do anything for her friends, but at times will cut a binch (and I think they have to hold her back when she goes into that mode). (oddly enough this is how I usually play her too 8U)

Kotone Shiomi (stage play): From what I can tell……she’s similar to the drama cd counterpart? 

So yeah…..going off of this….I’d say I’d be fine with a DramaCD type manga adaptation (as long as they explore that stepford smile trope really I’ll just be a happy little monkey). But, if I had to be REALLY honest…. I’d want an Asshole!FeMC. 8U I mean it wouldn’t be out of character, she has those options, and it’d be different (and maybe appeal to moe gap people, I think). I think it comes from two fanfics I read, the first one was waaaaaaay back when P3P came out, Persona 3 Portable: Minako’s Story and was the only novelization recap I’d read of either P3/4 (never read a Fairly English Story cause…I dunno, and I never read P4: Split Personalities cause it contained my NoTPs). And while it’s been awhile since I read P3P:MS (can barely remember  any of it tbh), I really liked how the FeMC was an asshole (even if it was mostly in her mind). It was just unique to me, it never crossed my mind….similar to how the FeMC and MaleMC maybe not being fraternal twins never crossed my mind and now to segue into…. The Fools’ Tournament. Ohhhhh my gawd. Just 3 years later I would find this fic (and this one is a full retelling of P3 to boot, and the only full retelling fic of Persona I’ve ever read/finished that’s been completed), and it’s consumed my soul since 2013. O_O This….this fic, it’s what really made me love the idea of asshole P3MCs (whom, btw aren’t related hence my segue). But no, no, Minato and Hamuko in this fic are freaking horrible to each other (and then they are super sweet and then super horrible and on goes this roller coaster), but it’s not like they’re karma houdinies. If they screw up they have to pay for it (as the author describes them, “they are very bad people trying to do good but keep screwing up”). I’m sorry I just….love this fic. ;w; Anyways, basically this fanfic is the reason why I think if they wanted to make Movie1!Makoto more of an asshole, it still would’ve worked if they worked it the right way. 

Tldr; So yeah. I’m down for a well rounded FeMC (similar to Souji from P4 manga and game!Yu). But I’d be on cloud 9 if we get an Asshole!FeMC adaptation. (and I’m always down for her being a bit of a pervert. 8U