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thewebcomicsreview · 4 years

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Seeing as I don’t have a job right now (one week furlough), I managed to get a lot of writing for Saffron and Sage done today. Now I feel good! Time to ruin that with a Homestuck 2 Liveblog! Last time: Jade kidnapped “Yiffy”, much to Jane’s distress! No time for that, though, as we’re back with the Candyland Kids.

HARRY: vrissy, i know this is a stressful predicament but i think that's going too far. HARRY: my dad believes in us. HARRY: and if he thinks there's something we can do, then there has to be a way!

Kind of interesting that Harry holds his dad’s opinion in such high esteem, considering that his dad has been AWOL pretty much his whole life.

TAVROS: Uncle john isn't to blame for this,,, HARRY: yeah, no shit tav. HARRY: this whole situation is because of YOUR insane hitlermom.

How the hell does Harry Anderson know who Hitler is? When did that conversation come up? This is a completely different universe!

TAVROS: Is less sincere,,, than it is,,, an attempt to weaponize something difficult for me, TAVROS: In order that you can win an argument,,, with harry anderson,,,,, VRISKA: GRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!! VRISKA: WILL YOU ALL JUST VRISKA: SHUT!!!!!!!! VRISKA: UP!!!!!!!!

A good example of why characters like John, Jade, Vriska, and sometimes Karkat are important in Homestuck or in stories generally. They actually do shit.

VRISKA: Neither you nor your friends have anything really important going on. VRISKA: Your lives and your planet are a total 8ore! VRISKA: 8ut somehow John loves you anyway. VRISKA: Try and be fucking gr8ful for that every once in a while. VRISKA: Not everyone is so lucky.

Vriska please do not be pining for middle-aged John Egbert. You have literally half a dozen semi-official love interests (John, Terezi, Eridan, Tavros, Meenah and Kanaya), please don’t pick the one old enough to be your dad. It was already weird enough when Adult John got hot and bothered by teen Roxy in the epilogues, to say nothing of you fucking a middle-aged homeless clown in a bush.

thespiansGlamor [TG] began pestering adamantGriftress [AG]

Oh, fuck you, Homestuck. It’s bad enough that Harry and Dave are both going to be referred to as “TG” in chatlogs, but now Vrissy and Vriska are both AG and have the same font color!

TG: i've allocated the strife specibus with the scissorkind abstratus? TG: hm. TG: using this weird vocab and stuff feels... well, weird. TG: i'm not sure why, but it seems as though everything that's about to happen is that much more important now. TG: or maybe it already was, but i just didn't understand just how important until this moment.

One issue with wearing your metaphor on your sleeve as much as Homestuck 2 does is that thematically important lines become really obvious.

I like how the triangle-shaped panel around Vriska escaping the crowd by simply walking into it is reminiscent of a magic 8-ball. That’s clever!

VRISKA: Your society... no, your whole planet... it deserves to 8urn str8 to MEGAhell, and I'm gonna 8e the one to fly it there! VRISKA: I'm gonna shatter your paradise into pieces with my 8are hands and SHIT IN ITS GRAVE!!!!!!!! VRISKA: HOW'S THAT FOR A FUCKING ST8MENT! VRISKA: YOU GOT ALL THAT, JANE CROCKER? VRISKA: DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT'S COMING FOR YOU???????? VRISKA: YOU'VE MESSED WITH VRISKA: ********VRISKA******** VRISKA: ****FUUUUUUUUCKING**** VRISKA: ********SERK8T********

There’s some extreme Dungeons and Dragons energy here, where Vriska’s plan to escape a mob of reporters working for a totalitarian dictatorship run by literal gods is to simply walk outside and publicly declare her intent to destroy the world as punishment for its sins.

And yeah, this is how that plan usually works in DnD, too.

Man, the next page is a wall of text, whereas in old Homestuck this’d be an animation. I get “fair wages” and “small budget”, but is still feels weird to see a big Strife scene merely get described with boring-ass words.

Fearing gunfire, the few paparazzi who aren't currently getting their asses handed to them by the world's angriest traffic cone start to trip over each other, diving for cover.

The world’s angriest traffic cone.

Far away, in her lair, Jane Crocker grabs the two sides of her computer monitor with enough strength to snap it in two. She can't believe what she's watching. Behind her, from a shadowy corner of the room, there is an agitated growling noise and the rattle of chains.

Is that Yiffy? Is Yiffy an animal? Please tell me Yiffy is not a person that Jade named Yiffy.

....Actually, please tell me that Yiffy isn’t an animal Jade named Yiffy that is Jade’s child via sex with another animal that might be my breaking point.

Vriska alights on the ground, rakes her throat, quietly spits out a little wad of blue, and wipes her mouth unceremoniously. Tavros pats Harry Anderson tentatively on the arm. Vrissy tries to be badass and cough up something too but she doesn't really make it work.

Vrissy::Vriska Vriska::Mindfang

It’s weird that John’s sprite is the same even though he’s middle aged now, but I like that his God Tier outfit doesn’t fit any more. Isn’t it magical? Ahh, who cares.

JOHN: this old thing is pretty uncomfortable in a lot of ways. JOHN: hm... JOHN: when we get a moment, maybe the two of us could brainstorm a redesign? JOHN: no pressure though. HARRY: !!!

Oh, that’s why! That’s cute.

JADE: theres something i need to tell you

don’thavefuckedadogdon’thavefuckedadogdon’thavefuckedadog

JADE: john... i have a daughter JADE: shes almost harry andersons age JOHN: ... JOHN: ... JOHN: you have a daughter.

Named Yiffy?

ROSE: It was at this point that Jade came to me. ROSE: I could understand her pain quite acutely, and so... ROSE: I agreed to carry a child on her behalf. KANAYA: . ROSE: ... Without telling Kanaya.

Without-

Kanaya is your WIFE. You LIVE WITH HER. Even ignoring the question of why you’d keep 9 months of pregnancy from your wife, how? Kanaya would have been living with humans for years at that point and she’s literally in charge of reproduction don’t tell me she thought Rose just got fat for a while and then lost the weight really fast.

ROSE: I'm... not sure why I made that decision. ROSE: I regret not telling Kanaya, of course. ROSE: But I can't say that I regret going through with it. ROSE: At the time, it didn't feel as though the deception was even all that prolonged. The whole affair was... short. ROSE: Purely physical, and nothing more.

ROSE: John, there isn't a father. ROSE: Jade and I are the sole parents of this child. JOHN: oh. JOHN: ... JOHN: OH. JOHN: oh i'm so sorry, i didn't th- ROSE: That's quite alright John, although you might like to direct that apology more towards your sister. ROSE: All I will say is that if you would like to take up the particulars with us, ROSE: Some *other* time,

Actually, if John doesn’t know that Jade has a male dog’s genitals due to a fusion accident, I’d love to know what that all-caps OH means. What does he think happened, that Jade and Rose managed to have a baby?

JOHN: so... how did you hide the pregnancy? ROSE: Oh, that was simple. ROSE: Jade's genes being, as they are, part canine, the gestation period was substantially reduced.

OH NO

Yiffy is literally a furry, isn’t she? Moreso that Jade, she’s a full-on “Can be naked onscreen and it’s okay because she’s covered in fur” dog girl.

JOHN: i think i understand everything so f VRISSY: WAIT!!!!!!!! VRISSY: YOU MEAN TO TELL ME VRISSY: NOT ONLY DO I H8VE A SISTER VRISSY: 8UT YOU NAMED VRISSY: YOUR ****SECRET CHILD**** VRISSY: ********YIFFY********????????

Vrissy makes an excellent point.

ROSE: We didn't call her Yiffy. ROSE: That would be a quite ridiculous thing with which to burden a child. ROSE: Her full name is Yiffany Longstocking Lalonde Harley.

Vrissy looks as though she is about to shit the belltower they are standing in, brick by brick.

ROSE: It was, in hindsight, a monumentally terrible decision acting as the final chapter in a long series of novels, each one full of progressively more terrible decisions than the last. ROSE: But that is the name that we decided upon.

Oh, wait a second. Vriska changed Vriska Maryam-Lalonde to Vrissy, and changed Harry Anderson to just Harry. So obviously she’s going to rename Yiffy to literally anything else, then rename Tavros, and then we’ve got a new set of four kids as Vriska leaves to do something else. That’s what going to happen, right? Right? Please?

ROSE: You have to understand... this whole situation ended up playing out a bit like an ironic game of chicken between the two of us. ROSE: Something that far outstripped anything that the Strider fraternity could have produced in their wildest, most jpegged creative wet dreams. ROSE: But in the end that triumph of irony came back to bite us in the fucking ass, as irony is wont to do. ROSE: There was absolutely no possibility of us casually letting you all know that, by the way, we had had a secret daughter named Yiffany Longstocking. ROSE: At least, not right away. ROSE: But carapacian change-of-name paperwork is so complex and circuitous that, eventually, keeping quiet forever just seemed like the more reasonable option.

This is, even for Homestuck, monumentally stupid. You named your daughter Yiffany Longstocking as a joke and then kept the child secret because you were embarrassed. You two are awful fucking parents. You are the worst parents in the entire series, and that includes Bro Strider and the spider that made Vriska feed it children.

And we’re literally at the point where the writing is bad and the joke is how bad the writing is. This isn’t enjoyable to read; you can’t make a bad B-movie My Immortal fanfic on purpose.

Even now, Yiffy is likely being held at spoonpoint

I feel like “Jade and Rose have a secret daughter named Yiffany Longstocking” can be a joke or it can be drama but maybe not both at the same time.

#Homestuck 2 #Homestuck #Homestuck 2 Liveblog

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alines7777 · 4 years

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right now i'd like to talk about kankri from homestuck

people talk about him like he's the absolute worst piece of shit who ever lived, and that his intentions must be less than admirable, especially karkat, and people take karkat's word for it because we like karkat — but here's the thing, that wouldn't be the first time that katkat's been wrong about someone he hardly knew.

( image artist : @n0pies )

but first, i'd like to provide a little context from the text of homestuck about the planet alternia/beforus

alternia and beforus and their rulers

starting with alternia, troll society engages in a practice known as "culling", in which disabled and 'mutant-blooded' trolls are slated for extermination, as per the condesce's will for trolls to become stronger through violent division, as was meenah's intent in trying sew division among her fellow players in sgrub by starting trouble.

but culling means death, so naturally, every troll on alternia dreads the thought of being culled, so feferi, the heiress to the throne, has an idea, "why don't we simply change what it means to be culled?", she even tries to get practice in her new form of culling by rounding up wild cuttlefish to live under her custody in her abode, yet when the text brings that up, it even says that they don't need to be in her care, but she takes them in anyway, which shows her disregard for the independence and autonomy of other beings. that was a roleplay scenario — her rulership over beforus was this idea put into action.

on beforus, troll society engages in a practice known as "culling", in which disabled and 'mutant-blooded' trolls are slated to be placed in the custody of trolls of higher blood and be coddled, as per the empress's will for trolls to live in comfort through disparaging unity. text on feferi and recounting on the part of aranea basically confirm it, beforus is quite plainly coddle country.

but culling means indefinite tutelage, so naturally, every troll on beforus dreads the thought of being culled.

the intentions of both meenah and feferi for trolls to be strong and well off respectively are all well and good, but the methods of both are all wrong.

the knight of blood

fortunately, there is a lot of canonical text providing exhaustive documentation and insight into karkat's background.

we know that his predecessor, the signless, encountered a troll of higher blood who took pity on him upon his emergence from the brooding caverns, where if that hadn't happened he would have been alternian-culled. we know that he advocated the abolition of culling and the bloodcaste system. we know that his followers took it upon themselves to create a sign and breed a lusus for his successor, in order to prevent his successor's alternian-culling, and we know that karkat was highly secretive about the color of his blood to avoid being alternian-culled, and also to avoid being pitied. we know that this was all tailored specifically so karkat might live to enter his session.

we also know that the signless and kankri are virtually one and the same.

the seer of blood

unfortunately, there is virtually no canonical text regarding kankri's background. if it existed, surely many would be as sympathetic toward him as they are toward karkat, even in spite of karkat's conduct. but thanks to canonical text into the signless and karkat, and the method of cross-reference, we can make a highly educated guess.

starting with karkat's beforan counterpart, we might say that he, like karkat, was secretive about the color of his blood so as to avoid being beforan-culled, which is virtually one and the same as being pitied, assuming he wasn't beforan-culled or maybe he found the friendship of someone who didn't and wouldn't particularly hate or pity him. (perhaps the beforan counterpart to sollux or vriska? who knows?)

either way, nobody is killed on account of beforan-culling, "besides, we're only taking care of him because we already know he can't take care of himself, so what's the harm?", nobody would feel any compelling need to create a sign or breed any lusus for a mutant-blooded successor, after all the intent would be to coddle him, to treat him as an invalid or perhaps even as a pet, so he would live to enter his session regardless.

now onto kankri himself, knowing the story of the signless, it would probably be fair to estimate that he would meet a higher-blooded troll who would pity him for having no corresponding sign or lusus, thus he might have been slated for beforan-culling.

i'm not saying with certainty that kankri was beforan-culled, what i'm saying is that it would make sense. i mean, we might also in some sense regard the death of the signless as alternian-culling.

what also makes it make sense is how kankri reacts to the way he is regarded by porrim. when she reaches to wipe his face, he becomes upset, when she calls him "kanny", he becomes upset, and voices that he'd rather be called "the insufferable" than be addressed as a "wiggler".

i mean, he's probably taking porrim's pale feelings toward him the wrong way, and there are probably better ways for porrim to express them, but it's almost as if kankri knows that he doesn't need her pity and doesn't want her pity, and to be clear, the operant emotion behind moirallegiance is pity. and he probably also takes her regard toward him as an attempt on her part to coddle him, which he clearly doesn't like, he is perhaps no stranger to being coddled, or he at least understands the concept and why it should strike him as offensive, and yes, dreadful.

kankri wants to be regarded as independent and autonomous, and he at least makes it convincing that he wants the same for others, so, like his alternian counterpart, kankri advocates for the abolition of culling and the bloodcaste system.

so if we want to regard the intentions of the signless as genuine and noble, then we ought to insist on kankri being treated with the same amount of good faith. they're the same person, with the exact same set of fundamental principles and ultimate goals, the only difference is the circumstances behind their reasoning.

yea, kankri was a total hypocritical dick in the way he spoke to mituna, in belittling mituna's legitimate need for headgear in retaining his autonomy, yet as kankri might rightfully fear, headgear could be construed by beforan bluebloods as a reason that's as good as any other to engage in beforan-culling, because, "he's so helpless, if he weren't then why is he wearing a helmet?", and then they might decide that all trolls who wear helmets for whatever reason might be slated for culling. but yea, that doesn't excuse kankri's conduct, besides, they're all dead anyway, so nobody is going to get culled, get a grip, kankri.

but karkat routinely antagonizes his friends, even while bearing remorse over having previously antagonized his friends, so he knows it's wrong and yet he still does that, and then he dodges culpability by compartmentalizing his actions as being the actions of his "past self" and not actually as his own actions, or did we somehow manage to forget that?

and then karkat talks a mountain of shit about kankri behind his back as kankri happily abides a seemingly pointless and arbitrary request from a friend whom he doesn't regard as disciplined or interested in his beliefs, a request that was intended as a ploy to trick him.

yea, in some ways, kankri is worse than karkat, but in some other ways, i also think he's far better as a person.

seriously, if we think kankri is the negative stereotype of 'sjw' tumblr, well, then i frankly think that his portrayal might in some sense be doing us too much honor.

yet for some reason, we are duped into hating his doctrines praising autonomy and condemning mollycoddling tutelage and genocide, doctrines that we all should cherish in principle, but we throw him out because he is shown as not very well-liked, even though we aren't very well-liked either. so whatever.

"but he talks too much"

that's already known to be a very typical tendency for seers and blood players, so why shouldn't it be doubly so for a seer of blood?

seriously, don't act surprised.

o, one other thing

with this shit of alternian-culling being about killing and beforan-culling being about mollycoddling, i guess we could say the two troll planets correspond to the troll emotions of hate and pity respectively.

so if karkat was inauspiciously encouraged by alternian culture to hate himself, then it seems fairly likely that kankri was encouraged by beforan culture to pity himself, especially if he were culled.

on alternia, if it's, "you were born with mutant blood, and everyone hates you, so why haven't you died yet, you sorry waste of space?", then on beforus (let me reiterate that it doesn't seem very likely to me that kankri had a lusus or a sign to his name, and if that's the case, it would merely have been difficult for him to go on without being discovered and beforan-culled, instead of impossible), it might've been, "you were born with mutant blood, and you don't have a sign or a lusus. how would you even be able to take care of yourself? if you could then why doesn't anyone believe it? it's so sad that everyone else thinks you need someone else to care for you, it's sad, you poor little thing."

if alternia instills hate, then we can be sure that beforus instills pity. if alternia taught karkat to self-hate, then why wouldn't beforus teach kankri to self-pity? (even assuming he wasn't culled, the threat of losing his autonomy and independence by being extensively mollycoddled constantly loomed over his shoulder.)

we all know that karkat made himself out as an asshole because he desperately wanted to find someone more deserving of his own hate than himself, so i think kankri makes himself out as an asshole the way he does because he hopes to find someone, really anyone, who would be more deserving of his own pity than himself.

so yea, i don't think it's fair on any account to talk shit about kankri, that is unless we also want to talk excessive levels of shit about karkat, which i don't

#homestuck #kankri vantas #karkat vantas #spoilers

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dedicatedfollower467 · 4 years

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openbound part 3

and then i never have to play through this goddamn game again (until i do another re-read, as i inevitably will...)

at least this is my favorite part of openbound!

oh right, this whole bit where people frequently mistake who’s who in the horuss/rufioh to dirk/jake parallel. cuz lemme tell ya... rufioh ain’t jake. should have been obvious what with the “he kissed my disembodied head back to life while standing on a mountain striking a badass pose”

i know horuss and dirk have a lot in common in terms of interests, but optimistic duelist is right that when you look at actual personality and behavior, jake has a lot more in common.

(now, whether dirk and rufioh actually have all that much in common, personality wise, is a different question. i think the truthful answer is no, not really, if only because dirk actually has the balls to break it off with jake when he feels like the relationship isn’t working anymore)

(although considering everybody except the stubborn as fuck badass girl hits on him and he’s uncomfortable with the attention, maybe he is a bit like dirk)

(i mean. frankly both of them have parallels to both of them and tbqh it’s probably just foreshadowing that the dirkjake sitch just ain’t gonna work out for either of them)

“he stole my breath away” sfaskadsfjhjaljadshfadskjadsfhjadsf fucking classpect puns

I FUCKING HATE KANKrI.

SHUT. THE FUCK. UP. BIIIIIIITCH!!!!!

he is so much worse this time around than he’s ever been before. mostly because now he seems less like a misguided sjw and more like a deliberate asshole saying things to mock and parody in bad faith.

because. y’know. technically he is.

“if you are faced with any crisis of identity whatsoever, it’s really important to do your best to manufacture esoteric features of your personality and believe in them very STrONGLY and tell people about those things as frequently as possible” aka THE MOST ANNOYING FUCKING THING ABOUT PAGES, WHICH APPLIES TO ALL FUCKING PAGES and also the reason i really, desperately hope poor tavvy crocker isn’t a page.

“they always wanted to be w1th me or... maybe even wanted to BE me?” this is really interesting in light of roxy’s pesterquest route where they imply that maybe their attraction to dirk was a misplaced gender identity thing where they couldn’t tell if they wanted to be him or be with him.

maybe it’s less about personality commonalities and more about interpersonal communication issue commonalities?

(or maybe they’re just both both. y’know.)

god i love damara. she’s so fucking funny. terrible person, but hilarious, since i can’t understand any of what she’s saying and literally have to guess based on context... i mean i could look up the translations but that just wouldn’t be as much fun....

god rose’s pouty face when she asks if kanaya is permanently de-glowed is SO ADOrABLE.

dave: kanaya we should talk more we really don’t talk enough YES DAVE I AGrEE!

“storytime with karkat: kanaya edition” I FUCKING LOVE DAVE AND KArKAT’S rELATIONSHIP IN ANY AND EVErY TIMELINE.

kanaya is so goddamn sassy i love her so much. why are there so many amazing characters in homestuck i can’t handle it.

god i love rose. i love everyone.

“i just know that on some hypothetical earth my shit is starting to get so lame” lmaoooooooo

but also... is that the tiniest hint of fourth wall awareness poking through? is this why he can tell ultimate dirk to fuck off in meat?

oh. oh dave’s doing a lot of sudden capitalization in this conversation, this makes me very happy. because it either means he’s picking up karkat habits, or he’s literally talking loudly, and either way that’s adorable character growth.

“the traditional mumbling monologue stage of Striderian discourse” nah, it’s not striderian, it’s just dave-and-roxian. like parent like child.

dave: maybe i’ll dream up my own john tonight

rose: lmao GAYYYYYYYYYYY

dave: fu

god i love the music in this game, rose’s and dave’s theme songs are SO GOOD.

“suddenly sigmund freud and king oedipus start banging each others hot moms at some kind of depraved sexy momswap party” DAVE.

“(still feel like i should work puppets into this. no idea why.)” oh dave has definitely spent too long under the plush thumb of lil cal/lord english.

I FUCKING LOVE KArKAT GETTING ALL ANNOYED AND PHILOSOPHICAL ABOUT SLEEPING KArKAT DrEAM BUBBLE SHENANIGANS.

TOUCH ME DAVE IT’S FOr SCIENCE.

“our conversations can be so embarrassing im glad we manage to have most of them in private” AKA DAVE AND KArKAT WErE ALrEADY GETTING CHUMMY EVEN IN THE PrE-rETCON TIMELINE!!!! probs just friends tho because karkat wouldn’t cheat on gamzee even though gamzees a fucker, and dave probably wasn’t ready to deal with the toxic masculinity and internalized homophobia yet.

“meenah was right that making them more aggressive would work better and the alternians proved it!” wrong, serket, the alternians won because karkat was working tirelessly to ensure they didn’t all fucking backstab each other, the players who won the game fastest were the beta kids, who LITErALLY NEVEr FOUGHT WITH EACH OTHEr, EVEr, NOT EVEN ONCE, NOT EVEN A LITTLE BIT. FUCK YOU.

annnnnnd that’s openbound finished! thank god. i think that’s where i’ll stop tonight, jesus this game is long.

page: 5399

#ultimate dirk made me do it 2019

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ardenttheories · 5 years

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On the meta stuff with Meena:

DAVE: ebubbles theyre awesome #how is this not awesome DAVE: its just some ridiculous shit i figured out how to do here DAVE: this whole place runs on memories so ive been messing around with that #just as long as you dont ask me how #we are cool DAVE: turns out i dont even really need the internet for shenanigans i can just exploit the afterlife

DAVE: you want to "be me"? #air quotes MEENAH: yeah why not DAVE: ok well without getting too deep into the issue of how absurd that request is on the very face of it #a face presently being palmed DAVE: its just not going to happen DAVE: i mean not yet anyway not this early in your little dream bubble quest you got going on here

DAVE: i really dont think we should get too meta about this DAVE: just #ok DAVE: look DAVE: youre on a mission to gather up all your dead friends and build an army or something #cant believe im even explaining this DAVE: personally i think thats a shitty idea but you are clearly motivated to do that MEENAH: yea #tru dat DAVE: so why would you waste time going around "being other people" it doesnt make any fucking sense #air quotes DAVE: for instance you cant be anybody in this fucking sandy beach area because ostenibly youre just charging through this place looking for your friends DAVE: dammit try to play the part at least somewhat #ahahaha #already too meta #i give the fuck up

Dave has this weird note again of the narrative and meta without going full ham. He understands roughly what the concept of “being someone else” is, but the actual idea of it seems to be ridiculous to him. There’s a feeling that he doesn’t quite believe what she’s saying (without getting too deep into the issue of how absurd that request is on the very face of it), and then that he’s just playing along with her weird idea (#cant believe im even explaining this, so why would you waste time going around "being other people" it doesnt make any fucking sense).

It’s like he gets it, but he also doesn’t. He’s talking in the way as if he can understand the key concepts of what’s happening and even what she’s trying to ask, but thinks the whole thing is bogus. He even says she can’t be anyone in the beach area because she’s just wandering through it - as if he doesn’t recognise that it’s acceptible for her to shift narrative however she likes, or as if his understanding of the narrative is completely different (she can’t be anyone there because they’re not relevant to her quest, even though she’s been other people for lesser reasons before).

It’s weird. He gets it, but he’s still skeptical of it. Like he doesn’t want to accept the fact that there’s this person out there that can just go around being someone else, as if someone can just suddenly be him.

Even when you look at the e-bubbles thing, notice how he says it.

It’s something “ridiculous” that works based on memories (which is a fair part of Time’s capabilities, I’m so frustrated I didn’t figure that out before). It’s an exploitation of the Afterlife.

Not the narrative. None of the things they’re doing now - the tags, the bubbles themselves, the way things work - he sees as being an effect of the physical narrative that we’re seeing. He allocates it to the dreambubbles themselves instead, and his ability to play with anything related to Time.

What comes after that, then, is the stuff about Time being related to the narrative.

Here’s the thing. Time isn’t about the journey, or the beginning. Time is actually just the End. That’s why it’s so heavily associated with Doomed Timelines and death; those are things that have ended, that are no more. It’s only one part of a whole narrative.

Space, the beginning, starts this. Then we have Life, which is the rising action, and Doom, which is the falling action. One that shows the growth of the plot and one that shows its stagnation to the finish. Then, of course, you have Time, which is the conclusion.

Logically, this means that each of these four Aspects should have SOME influence on the narrative, but not total. It’s only when all four come together that you get a whole story, after all; so how can you have a fully effective understanding of the narrative when you only influence one Aspect?

This is why Caliborn can control Homosuck; he’s the Lord of Time, the Master of the Ending. That whole timeline he creates is about that one specific Game Over; that’s him changing the story to be the defeat he’s always needed. He can’t influence the narrative sooner because it’s simply too early for him to play his part; it’s only when we’re getting to the Ending that he can clutch it in his claws and fuck it all up.

This is also why Calliope can control the Epilogues - or, one of them, anyway. If Space is about Beginnings and Creation, we need to think about what an Epilogue is; a continuation after something as Ended. This is Calliope playing up to her Aspect and reviving Homestuck from the ashes of its End, creating a new storyline and a new plot. Her influence is strongest here because we’ve come full circle.

In addition, note how Calliope can’t influence a timeline where the plot continues. Dirk rekindles Homestuck in Meat and sends John back into it, thereby continuing the same old story and forcing it back to life, which goes completely against Space’s control of the narrative. This isn’t the new Beginning she needs; it’s not even an Epilogue so much as a time-skipped sequel.

In Candy, however, the Homestuck plot is very much dead and done. Everything that happens after is completely inconsequential and could be an entirely new story in and of itself - which is exactly what she needs to bank on for it to be usable for her.

I think this, even, is why Sollux is able to tap into the narrative in some degree - such as with the code that destroys the universe - without actually being... aware? And why Meena is a lot more accepting of the idea of just “becoming someone else”. Both of their Classpects have connections to narrative control, with Sollux suffering from it (though we don’t see this in full potential because of how little he’s on screen) and Meena stealing it (what else could “becoming someone” be seen as except for Stealing their Life? We’re basically in control of them in that moment; we’re guiding them through the narrative regardless of what they would have, or should have, been doing, all so we can just see what happens on-screen.)

So, back to Dave. Lord and Muse have much better control over the narrative, likely because they’re masterclasses, and we can tell that, to some degree, the other Narrative Aspects can have awareness. Dave, being only a Knight, wouldn’t really be able to tell what’s going on fully simply because it’s not important enough for him to know, not part of his duties as a Knight; he can influence the narrative only in a very distanced sort of way, utilising it to create in-world effects rather than controlling it personally.

Dave could never be a narrative speaker, but he can definitely utilise parts of it to effect in the Homestuck universe. Things that they can interact with and see.

So, that might be a reason why Dave can interact with it, but not fully - and seems aware without being aware. His class is so rooted in the concept of the in-universe that he can only influence the narrative that way; even to the degree that narrative voices are audible for him, rather than subconscious.

As for Terezi, yeah, she’s a Seer of Mind. If we consider that what Dirk’s doing is destroying the sense of Self in order to destroy Individuality, and therefore leaving this big, gaping space of Heart behind, it makes sense that in its absence Mind will rule - albeit fractured. It’s essentially Mind control Lite.

It’s well within reason that Terezi can See this sort of control when it’s so heavy-handed. By that point, Dirk isn’t even trying to hide himself. His personality shines so brightly through the narrative that Terezi can probably smell the orange soda right off the page. I think for her it’s less metaphysical, though; she knows she’s being influenced, but maybe doesn’t know it’s through the narrative specifically - at least, not in the way that she understands it.

#ardenttheories #homestuck meta

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dahniwitchoflight · 5 years

Text

Candy 24-28

Yeah interacting is one way of putting

I think the closer Meat and Candy come to eachother though the closer they’re both gonna self destruct

“It will stay here for millions more years, where it will remain indefinitely on a barren, desolate Earth C, waiting to host a single cherub child, chained to its bedroom. But for now, it hosts these three.”

Alright so Earth C doomed to failure confirmed, it needs to be a barren desolate wasteland if it’s gonna be the literal planet for Calliope and Caliborn’s birth

oh my god.

That’s why Gamzee raised the baby cherub

what seemed so out of character for someone like Gamzee to do so long ago now makes perfect sense

He thought it was his role to raise Caliborn in that stupid ass LE/Dirk philosophy

Aww, Terezi’s dying ):

Aradia and Sollux are acting as Alltie’s like, double attendants?

Is that like, a flipside of Gamzee’s whole mirthful messiahs thing where he is on LE’s Side?

I mean, Aradia is pretty 8D and Sollux is pretty D8 as characters

That was a really good conversation from Terezi and John

It really does like, firmly solidify to me that Terezi and John retconning the fact that Vriska died to Terezi’s sword way back then was absolutely the incorrect way of handling things

it’s the cornerstone for how things have been ripped apart all this time since then i think

when it first happened, it was tragic and necessary and developed the characters into a certain way of being

Terezi’s got depressed and into a bad state of being, so now, we’ve been given the flipside and shown what would happen if Vriska had been spared in that moment

and the answer is

the same goddamn thing, Vriska leaves her, Terezi can’t get closure from it and her life spirals downward from there

except here were sort of shown what might have been her saving grace, an actual system of support from someone she cares about, and someone she can support in return

what an actual relationship is actually supposed to be

the reason why constant relationships didn’t solve her problems everytime she made new ones is because they were relationships built solely on whims, feelings, maybe some physical passion

but none of them actually offered any actual support or companionship

wanting to love someone really really hard and wanting to be loved by someone really really hard doesn’t solve your problems no,

but having someone to help you through those problems and work on them with you does actually help solve problems

I think that’s the key difference here in asking “which relationship would “”fix”” Terezi” the answer being the only actual two-way relationship she might have ever had

Channel change time for Karkat

and an alive Meenah, I forget how that happened in Meat but eh

anyway next page

“But if he doesn’t care that much, and there’s nothing to it, then why does he do it? Why does he seem to put care into the nonsense he badgers her with? He supposes he could ask the same of many features of his life. Why does he care? Why does he put the time in? When you can’t shake the feeling that nothing here has much intrinsic meaning—or rings as “canon,” to drop a term he has to admit has worn out some welcome in his vocabulary—how does one justify even leaving the house? “

that phrase there, “Nothing Here has much intrinsic meaning -or Rings as Canon” feels like a double meaning

on the one hand, John is saying nothing in this world feels like it’s actually real

on the other hand, the phrase can be read as “There are no Rings of Canon in this world” as physical objects

and we just got done seeing a page about the Life Ring

I wonder if those rings are not also imbued with some idea of not just Life, but canon?

and if that’s the case

maybe the two rings really are each half of what would become the house juju cursor thing

going on with the symbolic metaphor of two opposite objects mutually self destructing and creating something new

maybe when you destroy both rings by bringing them together, in the wake of their destruction would form the original plot hole - the cursor juju, a literal canon shaping hole in the plot

it’s kind of like the idea of two similar dimensional things coming together to make a higher dimensional thing, themselves seemingly being removed from those lower dimensions in the process

like, what happens when you fundamentally merge two perfectly identical 2 dimensional circles?

you get a singular 3rd dimensional sphere and no more 2d circles

so what happens when you merge two 3rd dimensional circular rings?

a literal 4th dimensional “hole” in canon where they once were

that’s my thinking anyway

anyway back to John having a breakdown over Terezi’s death

man Candy sure is something, I can’t really decide which one I found more interesting Candy or Meat

I felt like there was maybe more to react to in Meat, but there’s interesting bits in Candy as well

oh damn though ten year time skip on the next page O.o

oh fuck we skipped the war and gone straight to the dystopian nightmare havent we

their curfew is 13 minutes after midnight??? that’s so odd, also that makes it either 12:13 or 00:13 however you look at it

oh look, It’s JohnVris 2.0

huh, Karkat and Meenah got a love story out of it too

Now I wanna see a photoshop of like, Big Boss or whathisface from metal gear but just like trollified and with karkat’s horns

So Candy is definitely representing this idea of a character’s potential for the kinds of story arcs they might have, no matter what ends up happening

John stepping into his dad’s shoes and becoming a loving husband and father

Karkat becoming a revolutionary against a twisted tyrannical planet

these individual story beats all fall in line with their characters and what they might have been, had sburb never have been involved in their lives in the first place, is what I think

Roxy pops out a baby and become a mom after having a romance with a dashing young man is basically Rose’s Mom Lalonde’s storyline

Rose eventually becoming a key figure in a rebellion on a tyrannical version of earth is the same story here on Earth C as it was in the history of Roxy’s original planet as HER Mom Lalonde

but its the context of the story that makes it different or not

but these core tenants of the kinds of things and choices all these characters would do doesn’t really change all that much when you strip them down into their simplest forms

so in a way, even though nothing here is canon, it’s giving the audience and idea of what the story would be like if it was canon, how characters might react or grow up to be and the potential they have for doing certain things

but doing that also takes away all the nuance and symbolism of why it’s relevant and important for each story, and context matters intensely

John seems to reconcile with Jade and Dave if he’s the best man at their wedding

and if Dave is marrying Jade and John’s here and their all okay and it’s being held at Jake’s mansion....

no their making it clear theyre siding with Rose and Kanaya, but not as much as they could be I guess

Damn Roxy, I expected better of you, really? But she’s honestly just trying to gravitate towards the thing that makes her personally the happiest, with no regard to how she’s throwing everyone under the bus, p selfish of her

and for real, she’s with the people she always considered her closest friends

Jake’s actually the one going against their grain the most, but that might be because the closest person to him is already dead, and then his runner up is viewing Jade as his alt universe grandma. his channel with Jane is ruined and well, Jake wasn’t close with Roxy or Callie

people just value certain relationships over others sometimes

damn this one ends on a really somber note though

extremely filled with nostalgia of missed potential

Candy is where nothing went right for anyone technically

Oh shit it’s real Vriska, who fell into the black hole in Meat yeah?

Yeah with the way shes screaming about needing to see what happens when you beat the final boss it’s that Vriska hoo boy

hilariously channeling the desperation of the people who read this when it first dropped no wonder though

I am noticing in Candy that despite more and more history being generated, I have less and less to react to

that one line though about what the passage of time must feel like to immortals, that feelings of what used to feel like a day now only feels like a couple hours, what used to feel like a week now feels like a couple days

time gets faster the more you live it

pretty soon a day will be but a blink of an eye for people like John

#Homestuck #Meat or Candy

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amicicidalgambler · 5 years

Text

=> Vriska and Saness: Play a game~

sanesspsuede

Hey Vriska, have you spoken with Meenah since she changed back?

amicicidalgambler

Why do you ask?

sanesspsuede

Because she's really upset and I know you guys are pals...

I was gonna suggest that maybe you do check on her if you haven't because she'd probably appreciate the concern, and I was going to ask for your insight if you already had spoken with her.

amicicidalgambler

I mean, personally I felt like she made it pretty clear that she didn't want to 8e talked to right now.

sanesspsuede

Vriska, of anyone I know, you are the least likely to take a message at face value.

Have you not then, or are you trying to throw me for a loop? It's not like you HAVE to message her, I just thought it would be nice.

amicicidalgambler

It's very generous of you to think that I'd tell you if I was.

8ut no, I'm geniuinely saying that I haven't tried talking to her.

I'm not sure why you're so convinced we're that kind of friend.

sanesspsuede

What kind of friend?

The kind of friend that talks to each other in private?

amicicidalgambler

The kind where sort of thing is any of my 8usiness.

sanesspsuede

Are you having a bad day?

amicicidalgambler

No?

sanesspsuede

Right...

So you're saying you're NOT that kind of friend, to be clear? Or are you just acting baffled by like, the observation that you are. :T

amicicidalgambler

I'm saying we're not.

Again, I'm not sure why you're so convinced that we are.

Like, we are good friends and everything, and I like her, 8ut that doesn't mean we DM each other a8out our legitim8 emotional pro8lems.

sanesspsuede

Okidoki, I presume too much, it's no big deal!

Sorry for bothering you about it, Vriska.

amicicidalgambler

It's fine.

Sorry if I sounded snappy or something? I'm not really used to people trying to come to me with this stuff.

sanesspsuede

No?

But you have quads and friends, surely some of them care for one another beyond you as well.

amicicidalgambler

They do. 8ut they don't really involve me in any of that.

That sounds like I'm 8eing a downer again or whatever, 8ut that's just kind of how it is?

sanesspsuede

Not much for teamwork, are you? ^_^;

Which I suppose is untrue, given your heists with Nadaya...

Mutually beneficial teamwork isn't a concept you SEEM averse to.

amicicidalgambler

That kind of teamwork is fun.

I'm just not much of a clade person. amicicidalgambler

I mean, that and every8ody else just doesn't 8other trying to make me 8e a clade person.

sanesspsuede

As you will, of course.

Have you gotten off of the ship to do anything fun of late?

amicicidalgambler

I was with Nadaya earlier, 8ut it's not like we did much. And then this wasn't off the ship 8ut I was trying to trade movies with a guy 8efore he got hit with the trickster 8ug and got distracted. So I'd say those two together equal a yes.

sanesspsuede

Oh really? Did your visit with Nadaya go poorly, or was the failed exchange that disappointing?

amicicidalgambler

No. It's just that me and Nadaya were mostly sitting around, so that felt like kind of a lame answer on it's own.

sanesspsuede

Not exactly the sort of activity I would expect from the pair of you. Does Nadaya even sit still?

amicicidalgambler

He literally does not.

8ut sometimes I just go over to pet his cats and talk. May8e watch a show or help him with logistics. Just whatever.

sanesspsuede

Hehe. ^_^

That's all past-tense, so does that mean you've already returned to the ship?

amicicidalgambler

Yeah, 8ut it wasn't that long ago.

sanesspsuede

Ah, back to the same-old same-old, huh? That's no fun.

amicicidalgambler

Yeah, 8ut I'm used to it.

8esides, once my movie source is done with whatever the fuck it is he keeps going on a8out, I'll have something new to do.

sanesspsuede

Who's the movie source? :?

amicicidalgambler

Goldwave?

His url is Infiniteproxy.

sanesspsuede

Oh him!

Yeah, he's

Sure busy...

amicicidalgambler

He sure fucking is.

I have no clue what he's 8een talking a8out this whole time.

8ut eventually I'll get my movies from him.

sanesspsuede

It's kind of nice, being able to just watch all the crazy and not be at immediate risk. I remember when Terrible caught it, he was very deadpan.

You said the virus doesn't really do anything to you?

amicicidalgambler

That he was. 8ut yeah, exactly. Watching it is way more fun.

And no, it doesn't. Or not anything very noticea8le.

sanesspsuede

Not noticeable? So then what DOES it do? :?

amicicidalgambler

I mean, I think 8y the end I was using a couple more exclam8ion noodles. 8ut that's a8out all.

sanesspsuede

Do you feel any differently?

amicicidalgambler

Not really?

sanesspsuede

Is that right... How funky!

Why bother avoiding the tricksters then? :?

amicicidalgambler

When did I say I was avoiding them?

sanesspsuede

Are you not?

amicicidalgambler

None of them could get to me in the first place. So not actively.

sanesspsuede

Yet clearly you are free to visit others.

amicicidalgambler

'Free' is a 8it of a generous term.

sanesspsuede

That's fair enough. :3

amicicidalgambler

It seems like you're implying something, though.

sanesspsuede

What gives you that idea, and what, pray tell, would I be implying?

amicicidalgambler

Just a hunch.

8ut it's not like you're denying it

sanesspsuede

That's so funny coming from you, you've been playing badminton with my questions throughout this whole conversation!

What did you think I was implying, Vriska? Really?

amicicidalgambler

And that's also funny, since you say that like you weren't doing anything 8ack.

8ut let's 8e real here.

We could 8oth do this for a while, 8ut I know that you wouldn't 8e insisting like you are if you really hadn't 8een trying to say anything, and you know that I'm right.

So spill.

sanesspsuede

If you want to play this game, you have to answer my questions too. I'm not going to fold just because you tell me to spill from a universe away, Vriska.

amicicidalgambler

Well, since you can admit you're playing.

I think that you're implying that you don't think I've just 8een sitting around here.

sanesspsuede

Alright.

Why HAVE you been playing with me? Since we've established that you are.

amicicidalgambler

Like I said, I think you're trying to say something. There's only so many ways to pry things out of someone like you.

sanesspsuede

"Someone like me," ooo.

ORIGINALLY I was just trying to ask a question, you're the one who decided it should be a whole event. Wouldn't you say that's a bit unusual for you?

If not for you, perhaps "for you and me."

amicicidalgambler

It's a lot more unusual for you to "just" ask a question.

You say everything for a reason, Saness.

We wouldn't 8e here if you didn't.

8esides, I just told you I'm doing this 8ecause you're trying to say something.

sanesspsuede

That's cold! You sure put me up on a pedestal, what did I do to deserve that?

amicicidalgambler

It's not much of a pedestal. It's just an o8serv8ion.

sanesspsuede

Okay, so what did you think I was saying at the start?

amicicidalgambler

I already answered that one. I thought you were saying that thing a8out me 8eing free to visit others 8ecause you thought I was lying a8out what I'm doing.

sanesspsuede

That's not the start.

amicicidalgambler

Then when are you saying this started?

sanesspsuede

When did you make the conscious decision to start toying with me? I am not referring to our current, more pointed engagement.

amicicidalgambler

Then what *are* you referring to?

sanesspsuede

Vriska, you've been behaving oddly throughout this entire conversation, right from the start.

amicicidalgambler

So according to you, this has 8een a game from the start?

sanesspsuede

That is what I am asking you.

amicicidalgambler

No, that's what I asked you, 8ecause you weren't 8eing clear the first time.

sanesspsuede

Are you being intentionally frustrating about this?

amicicidalgambler

Is that not how this game is supposed to go?

Really though, I'm not doing it anymore than you.

sanesspsuede

Well, sorry to disappoint, but I'm really not as devious as all that. You've likely misread me.

amicicidalgambler

Oh, come on.

You're digging your heels on a su8question. After turning it on me after I asked. After digging your heels a8out literally everything I've said. I've practically 8een generous with the amount of inform8ion I've given in comparison.

Plus you even admitted this is a game. I'm not saying you're devious, I'm just saying you're playing.

It's almost like you don't like admitting that most people can't do this kind of thing.

Do you not like 8eing like this, Saness?

sanesspsuede

That last bit is absurd, most people are perfectly capable of everything you have described.

amicicidalgambler

Not like you're doing it.

It's a skill.

One that you've 8uilt up, and one that not every8ody has.

sanesspsuede

Are you having fun?

amicicidalgambler

Oh, did I actually hit a sore spot?

8ut yeah, may8e a little. You got me there.

sanesspsuede

I am at a loss. Do you have some goal here?

amicicidalgambler

You really must 8e at a loss, if you think I'm just going to tell you that.

sanesspsuede

Ha!

Is there any reason I should keep up this charade when I've already gotten the answers to my questions? Given that you've decided I am to be your entertainment for the evening, what do you think I have to gain?

amicicidalgambler

If you think you've gotten what you came here for, I can't stop you from leaving.

sanesspsuede

That wasn't the question.

amicicidalgambler

Yes it was.

If you've already gotten your answers, then there isn't much reason to keep this up. And if you want to end this here, then you can.

sanesspsuede

Are you quite satisfied yourself?

You have no reason for this to persist?

amicicidalgambler

Why would you want to even know?

It's not like this would 8enefit you any more at this point.

8ut even if I'm just doing this for fun, stretching it out until it's 8oring would 8e a net loss. So if you've decided you're done then that's fine.

sanesspsuede

Wouldn't you want to know? It doesn't interest you? :?

amicicidalgambler

Wouldn't I want to know what?

sanesspsuede

How badly you've been played, I guess.

amicicidalgambler

Haha.

Nice one.

8ut if this is how hard you have to 8ait me, I don't think I'm that interested.

sanesspsuede

Oh no, that was NOT bait. I was admitting defeat.

Rarely have I felt more like a fiddle, in fact.

amicicidalgambler

Aww, that's sweet of you.

So you're done, then?

sanesspsuede

Yeah, I think so, for now.

This isn't exactly fun for me, which I'm sure you're well aware of. And, like we've established, I'm not being held hostage and you're not interested in sharing your motives.

amicicidalgambler

Alright then. Thanks for playing ::::)

sanesspsuede

Yeah, thank you too. :3

#ooc #logs.txt #sanesspsuede #honorable mentions: brackishbarracuda trolljacksparrow infiniteproxy #THE GIRLS ARE FIGHTINGGGG

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bladekindeyewear · 5 years

Text

Boots Reads Homestuck Epilogue(s) Part 14 - Candy Page 27

==>

Alright, back from a brief excursion. I really, REALLY wanna fucking finish this. I want to see ROXY UNZOMBIFIED goddamnit, or at least get a REASON for her zombification, even if it’s just some Dirk-like villain who just cliffhangers himself away like a fucking asshole.

Also, comment on John’s whole rant... I guess John DID kind of want to be important. Or... well, not “important” per se, but rather at least impactful in his friends’ lives. It feels like they’re all walking dead through their own unsolved problems, trying to put on a pretty face, and nothing he tries to do matters, even attempted kidnapping. He feels as useless as Dirk THINKS he is, but he never really was. Gosh, I wish he’d pulled off that absurd kidnapping. Freeing people from this sort of thing is supposed to kind of be his jam?

Okay, reading the new page.

FUCK. TEN YEARS???????

Pff, John’s kid and sorta!Vriska. Yeah I can buy that.

Also I love how they type out “Harry Anderson” every single time as his full first goddamn name.

--God damnit, how is Gamzee still fucking things up ten years later? Hasn’t someone considered killing him?

Karkat and Meenah, also unsurprising. Too bad Dave has to die unsatisfied. >:(

Hm... this sorta!Vriska also has a weird Capitalization Quirk for Important Words, huh? --Oh right, Kanaya raised her. That might do it.

Hm, eyepatch?

Alright, the world’s falling into chaos. Did the world HAVE to fucking fall into chaos in BOTH TIMELINES where these supposedly-went-through-a-successful-journey heroes managed to eek out victory despite opposing reality’s greatest tyrant? Pfuh.

--and right. Alt!Callie reinforces the idea that even though this possibility “wasn’t canon” -- which... means Meat is?? D: -- that the lives within still matter when looked at within their own bubble.

JADE: while abstracted heavily, and fully freed from all forces of narrative gravity, these events still represent possibilities that slept within the hearts of all who reside here.

Mhmm, part of an extension of themselves, their uniqueness, their hopes and dreams and... whatever WHOEVER did to fuck Roxy over. Jesus DICK what’s happened to her I need to know you’d better fix this.

And somewhere within that mess, John Egbert is the best man at Jade and Dave’s wedding. He lasts nearly two hours before he gets a ruinous case of the sniffles.

Maybe they worked it out into ALMOST full mutual love? Even if Dave’s 70% gayness goes totally unsatisfied? I mean, I can hope, right? :(

Dammit, Jade, couldn’t you have done this properly? :C

and everyone knows that John has lost his family to Jane Crocker.

What the shit?!???

What drove Roxy away was him being depressed and just an all-around huge wet blanket who was impossible to live with. John is totally ready to own the fact that he was a bad husband, but maybe not the fact that he was a bad enough husband to drive his wife to passively support a brewing genocidal dictatorship. She looks happier, though, whenever he’s caught sight of her behind Jane—Calliope faithfully at her side—in any of the propaganda broadcasts that Jane passes off as business press conferences. By the time Roxy finally cut things off between them, he hadn’t personally seen her smile in years.

WHAT. THE. SHIT.

WHY DID ROXY DO ALL THIS THEN. WHY DID SHE OF ALL PEOPLE, ONE OF THE MOST FORCEFUL AND SMART AND COOL--- GUHHH SHE JUST VOIDED HER WILL JUST OUT OF OBLIGATION TO JOHN OR SOMETHING?????????? WHAT THE FUCK WHYYYYYYY

Characters choke. Characters make bad decisions. That’s fair. Andrew’s said that before. But John was VISIBLY RECOGNIZING HOW OUT OF CHARACTER ROXY WAS ACTING. WHYYYYYYYYY DID IT HAPPEN, WHY SUDDENLY DECADES OF MISHANDLED RELATIONSHIP WITH ABSOLUTELY NOBODY POINTING OUT THE OBVIOUS WHAT THE FUCK. AND ROXY WAS THE ONE WHO STARTED IT AND PUSHED INTO JOHN UNTIL HE ACCEPTED. WHY.

WHY.

Read. Calm down. Read. There had better be. A FUCKING. ANSWER.

Hi military rebellion leader Karkat.

KARKAT: OH MY GOD JOHN, STOP BEING SO FUCKING PATHETIC FOR JUST A MINUTE. COULD YOU DO THAT FOR ME? JOHN: i don’t know. that’s a pretty big favor you’re asking me there, karkat.

heheh

JOHN: i dunno. it doesn’t seem responsible, really... to dedicate my life to something so important when i’m in a place where i can’t even find the energy to think that getting out of bed in the morning is “important.”

Depression stuff, yeah.

John really needs a psychologist who isn’t just Rose.

pff, yifftrain.

That’s how the years pass. Faster and faster the longer it goes.

What. The. Fuck.

We’re not going to get any answers are we. Roxy just acted out of character for no reason, didn’t she. This is-- no, Andrew’s too GOOD at this for that to-- I mean-- is there a big answer he’s just not telling us-- FUCK!!!! D:

AAAAAAAA

This sucks. This sucks this sucks this SUCKS. But I’ll keep reading. I have to know. If I’m ever going to be able to stand, like, i dunno... homestuck rp i guess? i should probably keep reading. and hope i recover. eventually.

But that’s only part of it. Above this Earth, the dead cherub is still meditating, waiting for the day when she can have her own heroic apotheosis. Waiting for the day when she can confront the one she calls the Prince. And on this Earth, John is just waiting for the day that feeling finally stops. That feeling that he’s still waiting for something, and the even worse feeling that years ago, he missed his only chance to put an end to it. If you stand on a very high hill at dawn, you can watch your shadow move in an arc around you.

Yeah, reinforcing that John would be happier in the timeline where he did something and -- at least temporarily, since there’s hope of future revival -- “died” because of it, even if he wasn’t clear on why what he was trying to do even really mattered in the whole scheme of things.

...which is pretty weird when you consider the ending of Homestuck didn’t try to express that messa-- no, wait. I guess it did?

Yes, everyone went to the post-victory planet to live out indefinite lives, but there WAS still the stage play. Proving that John, at least, WOULD eventually step outside the happy ending to instead risk his life doing something important. They earned both possibilities, really, to choose from at their will.

...Aren’t there another dozen pages or so left in this Candy segment, though?? Are we gonna follow their kids or something?

==>

...Okay so stuff still needs to happen here, plotways. Good. I think.

A flash above the clouds catches John’s attention: another ghost, falling down from wherever it is they come from. John follows after the light with an exhausted sigh. The novelty of dead trolls falling from the sky has really worn off over the years. But he might as well go warn the new arrival that they’ve landed in the middle of an imminent warzone. He sets down at the edge of the crater and peers through the smoke.

He recognizes the ghost immediately, because he sees a younger version of her almost every day.

JOHN: vriska?

Vriska’s face snaps up, eyes blazing. Eyes. Actual eyes, with expression, color, pupils, and everything.

JOHN: wait. you’re... JOHN: alive??

PFFFFFFhahahahah!

That’s pretty hilarious. Vriska fell into the singularity and popped out here.

...Yeah, you can’t stand having missed the most “important” bit, can you. Too bad. You didn’t have the spotlight in the end.

==>

JADE: it is the one i have been waiting for all these years. JADE: we have run along parallel lines for what may as well be eternity, but my gravitational well has finally ensnared him. JADE: and now he is due to fall into this world.

Uhh, who? Davebot or something, from the postscript? Couldn’t be Gamzee, unless it’s, like... a different Gamzee.

“Chaos war”? That’s a dramatic title.

==>

Hmm, reading reading...

Will Dad’s passing knock any sense into you? Probably not.

...yeah, it wasn’t going to be that easy, was it?

Of course. Of course Dad died saving the President.

Although, she’s going to assign fault to Karkat and then want to start a full bloody war over it, so, the opposite of having sense knocked into her then.

JANE: UGH! JANE: That... that fool!! JANE: I can’t believe that he would do this! JANE: How could he do this to me!?! JAKE: Janey... JANE: The human president could be anyone! JANE: My dad can’t be anyone but him!

Jane, you’ve become a real asshole. :(

...Fuck you Gamzee.

GAMZEE: hEy. GAMZEE: Do YoU tHiNk ThAt MiGhT bE a BiT mOtHeRfUcKinG xEnOpHoBiC?

PFFFFHAHAHAHAHAAHAHhhh oh my GOD :’D

JANE: What? You think appealing to me with your disgusting little addiction is going to sway me?

Oh Jesus Christ that’s horrifying. THAT’s what’s been going on. I don’t want to visualize it, dear lord.

==>

Hahahah, catching Vriska up. She’s practically curling up in a ball like Squidward in future shock.

PFFF PUTTING PARENS AROUND HER NAME SHE CAN’T STAND BEING IRRELEVANTIZED LIKE THAT

JOHN: i was supposed to go fight lord english, but i didn’t. so now we’ve gone beyond, like, the event horizon of canon. (VRISKA): What the fuck does that even MEAN????????

Wait, shouldn’t YOU know exactly what that means, Vriska? Like, better than most people at least?

JOHN: all i know is that all of this is my fault.

JOHN: it’s been turning around in my head like this for a while. i thought... JOHN: why does everything here fucking SUCK so much? JOHN: how the hell did we even make it from point A to point festering clusterfuck? JOHN: it doesn’t follow any kind of logic i understand, or any sort of basic sense i have about who we are as people... JOHN: and why? why have we all ended up so unhappy and... twisted up?

Yeah, a BUNCH of people have acted really goddamn out of character and it’s unclear why.

JOHN: i got everything i wanted. everyone got what they— JOHN: what i thought they wanted. JOHN: and that’s just it, isn’t it? JOHN: the more i think about it, i’m the only factor that matters to anything.

--What?!? No!!! You could SEE that this wasn’t what you thought they wanted right from the get-go. It couldn’t have been YOUR imagination that this realm of alternative possibility was drawn from, could it? D:

JOHN: whatever i did, or didn’t do, just... destroyed reality’s ability to, like, substantiate itself, or whatever. JOHN: like there’s a bug in the operating system of whatever force in this world that regulates cause and effect. JOHN: everything’s been unraveling. nothing that happens makes sense anymore. JOHN: and now i’m the only person out here who’s even real at all! JOHN: hahahaha.

That’s certainly an idea at least, that people started acting out of character as we went further from “canon”. In fact, it’s kind of a slam at fanfics, maybe? Acknowledging that they distort the characters by understanding them in different ways, sometimes, and.. hm.

(VRISKA): Hahahahahahahaha... Wow, I’ve never seen a guy get his 8ulge all the way down his own swallow chute 8efore! JOHN: wait, what? (VRISKA): Good fuck. Do you actually think reality gives that much of a shit a8out you? (VRISKA): Get real, Eg8ert. (VRISKA): It’s not like you’re me. JOHN: ok, well. JOHN: that’s fair i guess.

Heheheh. ...Yeah, Vriska might pep talk him out of this self-deprecating theory of his. Besides, I mean... is that the ONLY cause for this whole fucking situation? That Roxy’s will got eroded to nothing arbitrarily either at random in a glitching non-canon timeline or because John kind of maybe thought something was going to happen and reality decided to run with it??

...heheh, “batterpanzers”.

I’m pretty sure caring what “c8non” is supposed to be is EXACTLY the thing you’re freaking out about, Vriska, whether you realize it or not.

Oooh, Gamzee. Do we get to see Vriska kill him?

Yeaaah... redemption ain’t for THIS sp8der. The ghost version of Vriska got the closest thing to redemption she’ll ever get; THIS version never learned any damn lessons and is not going to accept that she ever NEEDS to. Also, you said her name in relevance-reducing parentheses. Bad move.

==>

Yaaaay here’s the bunch of indigo blood we were promised!! :D

Where’s the nudity though? Maybe that’s coming.

He yowls as if he had actual testicles to be mauled, and for all anyone knows, maybe he really does.

It’s reassuring to see that while Andrew is more than willing to give us WAY too much genital detail in some cases throughout this epilogue, he still knows how to deftly exploit the parts of anatomy that still AREN’T explicitly characterized and remain intentionally vague for their impactful resulting humor. :)

She lunges at Gamzee’s catastrophic face lips-first, and practically dives into his mouth, ramming her tongue into his

NOOO FUCK HE WAS ABOUT TO DIE AAAAAA D’:

FUCK :(

Okay, back on to anything but this.

==>

Oh shit, double Vriska. This might be bad.

...Phew. Nice save, John.

JOHN: ha ha. yeah, right. because this is real life, right? JOHN: i guess reading narrative relevance into a bunch of dumb and totally random events is kind of lame and childish. ROSE: No, that isn’t what I meant at all. ROSE: By all means, apply a narrative to our lives. Up until a certain point, it would have been perfectly accurate to do so. ROSE: But not anymore. JOHN: because... it’s not canon, right? ROSE: Do you remember what I told you years ago? About the three pillars of canon?

Wuh-oh.

ROSE: As I explained to you on that morning sixteen years ago, there are three critical features of canon: essentiality, relevance, and truth. JOHN: yeah. ROSE: We have been untethered from the mooring of “truth” for some time now. ROSE: So while we, in our subjective experiences of conscious perception, feel in this moment that we have known each other for a very long time, technically it’s not true at all.

...Okay. Okay.

So. Were, like.

Roxy and Calliope affected by the, like... “untruth wave” of his choice not to go the hardest, because he made it in their vicinity? And that turned Roxy into a hypnozombie with minimal apparent free will? :C

...Oh wow. She’s thanking John that she got a chance to be happy in this side timeline, even if so many other people suffered. Because of the fucking hell Dirk was about to unleash on her in the Meat timeline. Fuck.

ROSE: In the silly wizard story I wrote when I was a child, ROSE: The realm most comparable to heaven existed in a state of subliminal conditionality, dependent on the inscience of the individual experiencing it. ROSE: Which is to say that it would cease to exist the moment you realized what it was. ROSE: And so, those with knowledge could never truly be happy.

Oh wow, huh. Yeah, knowing you’re just in a fanfic kind of screws your appreciation for life around you, huh. So John got fucked over a bit by his metatextual awareness. :(

And... Rose was, like, cut off by his choice from her own metatextual awakening, maybe? Hence her ability to appreciate a life somewhere disconnected from anything “canon”?

ROSE: But that isn’t me anymore. ROSE: I am blind against the veil of this world. ROSE: It’s all ambrosia to me. ROSE: I don’t care if it’s not true. I care even less if it’s not canon. ROSE: I have a beautiful wife who I love more than I thought possible, and a daughter who I am immeasurably proud of. ROSE: It can all be senseless, ephemeral noise that dissolves in the void. A whisper swept up by the wind before it’s uttered. ROSE: I’m still grateful to have felt this way.

:’)

Alright, this might be a pretty good way of accepting their potential happiness in different timelines as a potential substitute for Dirk’s mess. I’m not sure HOW well I’ll be able to internalize it to stop the stomach cramps, but we’ll see.

We still have a little bit more left, though. Next post.

#Homestuck #Homestuck Epilogue #Upd8 #Homestuck Liveblog #bladekindeyewear #BlastYoBoots

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betweengenesisfrogs · 5 years

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The City of the Old Emperors: Thoughts on Openbound

DJay’s post reminded me that I have a lot of vague thoughts about Openbound, which I’ve never managed to organize into a coherent essay. In part, I was waiting for DJay to share his idea of Openbound as a kind of katabasis (journey to the underworld), which is central to a lot of my thinking these days. Now that that idea’s arrived, let me talk about some of my own.

Spoilers, as with all the best Homestuck analysis, for the book version of The Neverending Story.

So. I’m very much in agreement with DJay’s big thesis that the shallow, annoying personas the Dancestors hide in are a ruse - a distaction, if you will. The dancestors present themselves as annoying, one-note characters, but they actually have a lot of history and pretty complex psychology if you look a little further - it’s just that at *this* point, after a billion years of living out their memories they’ve retreated into simplistic roles that they can safely play without engaging any more deeply with their past. Terezi and Karkat even acknowledge this, calling them caricatures. I love DJay’s term - “shades.”

I think where this really clicked for me was in in-story Hussie’s comment on Latula. He claims there’s nothing more to her other than being a cool rad gamegrl radgirl coolgirl.

This is obvious bullshit. Talking to her as Porrim reveals that Latula puts on the gamegirl persona as a way of dealing with other people, and she’s actually kind of relieved to be able to drop the act and acknowledge her problems. Relatedly, talking to Kankri as her reveals that she’s dealing with the problem of him awkardly hitting on her, which is one reason she retreats into a Gamegrl persona around him.

This is true for basically all of the characters introduced in Openbound. In-story, Kurloz is dismissed as a ridiculous mime when he’s helping Gamzee orchestrate LE’s rise and suppressing the agency of his friends (oh hey, Gamzee does this too, putting on the persona of “lolrandom incomprehensible prankster”); Cronus is indeed terrible, but terrible in a “what could have been kind of way” where he once had the chance to be a Harry Potter-esque hero; Mituna babbles and insults but only because he burnt his brain out making a great heroic sacrifice, Damara distracts the pretty significant statements she’s making about LE with vulgarity, Rufioh is pretty insecure beneath being Rufioh ...the list goes on.

So Hussie, in his in-story persona, is a god damn liar, and this is key to everything to that comes next.

The funny thing is, you don’t get the real stories from Hussie. You get it from talking to Aranea, which is framed as an act of “indulging” her, and by extension the author...but it’s only this “background” information which gives these characters complex lives and motivations beyond their personas. The effect it has is not of indulgence - the effect is to frame the whole dancestor ballet as a non-indulgence, revealing them as deeper than they seem.

(At this point, though, many readers will already be sick of them, and miss what’s really going on.)

Porrim would seem to be the one exception. In her case, though, I think it’s not so much that the reader doesn’t recognize her complexity as a person, but that her friends don’t. They stereotype her as being all about sex and relationship when her sex positivity is actually part of a larger goal of honestly examining her society. She’s the only one who can see the personas for what they are, since she recognizes it as something put on her from the outside.

The theme of a voyage to the underworld (katabasis) can be analyzed a number of different ways, and all of them fit Homestuck. As an epic, Homestuck of course has an obligation to go to the land of the dead halfway through its story, so that the protagonist can learn something they need to know.

If there’s anything we’re learning these days, though, the protagonist of the epic Homestuck isn’t a character, it’s the MSPA reader. It’s us who make the journey to Homestuck’s underworld. Meenah plays the role of hero there, with Aranea her guide, but we know that we move through which characters we control, each of them being temporary analogues for our will. We are the ones who descend into its hell.

(And now I think we’re finally figuring out what we’re supposed to learn there.)

Just as DJay says, the fact that these characters are reduced to stereotyped shades is all Lord English’s fault. Literally, they’ve been hollowed-out by millions of years of being trapped in their memories, thanks to his machinations ruining their lives, and now face his threat again in the afterlife. Metafictionally, we’ve been asked *not* to care about them by the narrative, in the same way Caliborn demands that we don’t give a shit about Homestuck. That’s LE’s great power over the narrative: the threat of apathy.

I tend to think of Life, in Homestuck’s platonic-narrative symbolic system, as representing positive character growth, and by extension things that readers experience as positive development. It’s interesting, then, that the one who brings these dead souls back to life is Meenah, a Life player. It’s even more interesting in that it’s Meenah who deprived them of their lives in the first place. Thinking to escape a dead session for the afterlife, the Thief of Life robbed them of their literal lives, but she also robbed them of their chance to grow as a people. They are thus echoes and victims of LE’s nature as a being that cannot grow or change, and is doomed because of it. But also, it’s kind of Meenah’s fault. Her frustration with them echoes her own choices.

(Worth noting, though, that Tavros is able to persuade them to take part in the final fight against him! It’s subtle, but a little burst of Life at the last moment.)

Openbound is full of good parallels to katabasis mythology. The dream-bubble afterlife echoes both Greek Hades and Christian hell. Homestuck’s dancestors are a lot like the shades Odysseus and Aeneas encounter: they’re faded ghosts, “shades,” who can’t speak until the hero gives them blood to restore their intelligence for a brief time. In Homestuck, what we - and Meenah - give them is a brief window of attention. But it won’t last, and it won’t restore them to life. But it’s also Dante’s Hell. Dante sees souls undergoing ironic punishments, trapped by their own greed, avarice, and lust. The limitation of their will is what keeps them in hell.

There’s one more descent story which I think is very instructive here, though.

And that would be the City of the Old Emperors from Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story, a tale which has quite a bit of relevance for Homestuck.

The first half of The Neverending Story featured the protagonist Bastian being called into the pages of the book and the world of Fantastica, explicitly stated to be a realm made of humanity’s ideas, to recreate this world anew. In the second half of the book, he does so. Unfortunately, as he becomes more sure of his world-creating power, Bastian loses the memory of his own humanity, and begins to forget that Fantastica is not merely his plaything. Declaring himself Emperor, he tries to pretend he created it all, when really he was only acting through the power of another, The Childlike Empress. Bastian soon undergoes a spectacular fall at the hands of his previous allies and friends.Only then can he wake from his reverie and find the last wish he needs to achieve redemption.

But for that redemption to happen, he needs to go into a kind of underworld himself, to learn what mistake it was that he was making.

After being defeated by his friends, Bastian stumbles into a strange city. His horse disappears under him, and he falls - down, down into a crater, where there is a city of strange buildings, full of people in strange clothes doing bizarre things. Before long, he finds a monkey-like guide named Argax, who calls the place the City of the Old Emperors. These strange figures, Argax informs him, were all people from the human world who declared themselves Emperors as Bastian did, and this is the sad result.

“How did they get here? What are they doing here?”

“Oh, there have always been humans who couldn’t find their way back to their world,” Argax explained. “First they didn’t want to, and now, in a manner of speaking, they can’t.[...]”

“Why can’t they?” he asked.

“They’d have to wish it. And they’ve stopped wishing. They used up their last wish for something else.”

“Their last wish?” said Bastian, going deathly pale. “Can’t a person go on wishing as long as he pleases?”

“[...]No! No!” he chattered. “You can only wish as long as you remember your world. These people here used up all their memories. Without a past you can’t have a future. That’s why they don’t get older. Just look at them. Would you believe that some of them have been here a thousand years and more? But they stay just as they are. Nothing can change for them, because they themselves can’t change anymore.”

- The Neverending Story, Chapter 23, pg 378-379

Bastian learns that all these people used up their wishes, leaving them unable to understand or interact with the world. Imagination eludes them - they can only tell stories by randomly forming words from jumbles of letters. Because they didn’t understand where their wishes were coming from, they were left without the capacity for wishes altogether

Another way of saying this is that they were left without will. They have no will to impact the world, because they turned away from the world altogether, retreating into a false idea of themselves. A persona, and not a person who could grow.

This is exactly the position we find the dancestors in in Homestuck. In both Homestuck and the Neverending Story, the limitations of one’s own will are the limitations of one’s agency to influence reality, and the Beforans have given up their will. Theirs is the same mistake as Bastian’s, as Caliborns, and it leaves them hollowed-out, unpleasant, shallow people.

It is their ideas about their will that failed them.

From his encounter with the Old Emperors, Bastian learns the truth about his wishes, enabling him to make his last few wishes count, and bringing him to where he needs to be to find the Waters of Life and make his final wish a wish for his own capacity to love.

So what do we need to learn from the Beforans?

Like us, Bastian is at once both a reader and the protagonist of the story. Michael Ende uses Bastian’s experience to argue that readers have a responsibility to the stories they read and tell. We must give them dignity by breathing life into them, rather than read them in self-indulgent, shallow ways, and we must be willing to grow as we read them.

Homestuck suggests much the same thing. Just as Bastian needed to descend to the hell of the Old Emperors to understand his mistake, we need to descend to the hell of the Dancestors to understand the final confrontation with Caliborn. Like them, we are offered a choice. We are shown his limited view of the world - a view that reduces Homestuck to shallow jokes. We must decide whether we will become him - or set ourselves free.

And to set them free, from the hell they’ve made for themselves, we must also, difficult as it is, believe that the Dancestors can change, more than they can believe it themselves.

In presenting us with their ballet, Hussie challenges us with his favorite question: are we going to accept the surface level, that Homestuck is just a bad joke full of meaningless flat characters?

Or are we going to take up his challenge to look a little deeper, to breathe life into them and believe there’s more going on beneath the surface - even, no, especially when it’s hardest to do so?

The dark hell of Openbound is the other side of the triumph of Calliope’s Rapture. Homestuck’s fractal structure reflects itself many times over, again and again asking us what we make of it, because we can make of it what we will.

But what will we make of it?

Ah, that is our story, and will be told another time.

#the meta theological thesis #openbound #dancestors #lord english #the neverending story #the power of ideas #understanding homestuck #homestuck is shaped like itself #gnostic influences #the rapture #katabasis #homestuck fandom #meenahbound #life aspect #beforans

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cookiefonster666 · 5 years

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Thoughts on the Homestuck Epilogues (Tumblr Edition)

I predicted the future!

Might as well adapt this Blogspot post I made about a week ago into Tumblr form, why not. With a few minor changes. I don’t like using Tumblr but I figure it’s a good additional platform to share my surprisingly positive views on the Homestuck Epilogues.

The epilogues have a lot of controversial content, most of which I avoid talking about here.

BRIEF SUMMARY

4/20, read through Meat: epilogues pretty good

4/20, started Candy: what the fuck

4/21, stopped: aaaaaaaaughhhhh bluh i hate everything

4/24-ish, continued Candy: epilogues alright i guess also i am sad now

4/27-ish, finished: I LOVE HOMESTUCK

BRIEF-ISH SUMMARY

Meat was a wild ride that started as cool plot stuff and things that make you go "OH FUCK", continued as basically chapters 7-9 of Detective Pony (which I naturally enjoyed a lot), and ended as a mess of sheer chaos and destruction. My thought process ended as, "oh duh, this is the bad ending, candy must be the good ending". I was in for quite the nasty surprise.

I quit reading Candy just a few pages in. It didn't take long for it to suddenly become the weirdest fanfiction ever. Frustrated, I started skipping and searching through later parts and got rather salty when it turned out both sides were the "bad ending". I saw firsthand what vfromhomestuck meant by "clear your whole week": this is not something most people can just read in one sitting. Then I recovered a few days and read Candy in earnest, in a somewhat anachronous order and with many parts read multiple times. Slowly, I started to hope that the epilogues would be followed up with a true happy ending for real this time. I may or may not have written a snippet of some form of fanfiction paving the way for a happy ending.

Once I finally accomplished the equivalent of reading Candy as intended, I got hit HARD with feels. I accepted that the epilogues have many issues but as a whole (not just the sum of parts) are an absolute masterwork, sometimes because of those issues. It didn't take me long to realize the brilliant duality either. Meat is a side-splitting metafictional farce that (for me at least) is impossible to treat as anything resembling a story of people doing things. Candy is a tale of FEELS, and I don't use the word FEELS lightly. FEELS means I almost cried, like I did when I watched the Futurama episode Luck of the Fryrish.

DETECTIVE PONY AND METAFICTION

Before I move on and talk about the CHARACTERS, I'm going to discuss the meat epilogue's resemblance to sonnetstuck's Detective Pony. I love everything about Detective Pony, more than almost anything else in existence. My abnormal love for that godlike fanwork probably skewed my perception of Meat a bit. Starting from page 17, Dirk takes over the narration then fights over it with god tier Calliope; both do rather questionable deeds and Dirk was hit hard by fans as a result. Seeing other fans react towards that character with such hostility gave me a very distinct feeling of "what, am I missing something?" Dirk's takeover felt like a lengthy work of comedy to me; a story that never strips away from the fact that it's fiction, in a vein near identical to that of Detective Pony. I like to think I am in the right for perceiving that arc this way, because I think everyone who has read Homestuck should read Detective Pony. One of the epilogue authors read Detective Pony after writing the epilogues and was struck by it; I take this accidental mirroring of (post-)canon as proof that sonnetstuck understands Hussie's ways through and through. I like to think I have a solid understanding of Hussie's ways by now, but this guy is on a whole new level.

That said, the meat epilogue gets a bit carried away with metafiction to the point of making me think, "god when will things go back to normal". Towards the end of Detective Pony, Dirk goes through an existential crisis followed by a powerful revelation, and then resolves to do whatever it takes to erase his abominable creation. But the meat epilogue ends with (both figurative and literal) crashing and burning; no ultimate redemption for our poor Strider. Homestuck doesn't usually have much of a problem with getting carried away with stupid nonsense; maybe a few rare occasions in cases like Hussie's self-insert scenes. But getting carried away is a major criticism I have with cool and new web comic. I love that comic to death, but the parts that take a long time to dwell on the cool and new characters being creepy or weird are a chore to go through. o (the author of CaNWC) seems to have improved in that regard; the cool and new trolls' arc is much more to-the-point with such nonsense.

Meat getting carried away with metafiction is a major cause of my initial burnout shortly after starting Candy. I was sick of this mass dump of metafiction and expected Candy to be a refreshing change of pace. Haha, if only. My fault for reading Meat first. At night I sometimes ponder in envy of the parallel universe me that started with Candy. Actually I don't do that, I just thought it was a funny thing to say. Though I have on more than a few occasions sat in bed fantasizing about how awesome my life probably is in some parallel universe. What point was I making again? Oh whatever, it doesn't matter. I guess I should write a similar overview of Candy's narrative nature. Here goes:

LUCK OF THE FRYRISH AND SADSTUCK

Sad things are sad.

^ There, that's my candy overview. How hard was that?

With the two summaries out of the way, I figure the best way to dump out my residual thoughts on the epilogues is going character by character. I won't do every character, mostly just the ones who played large roles and were already characters in Homestuck proper. I'm sorting these characters in tiers of how well I think the epilogues handle them, mostly from worst to best.

N-TIER

N is not the lowest tier; it's the tier that cannot be ranked. N stands for two things here: "Not Applicable" and "Narrators". Naturally enough, two characters fit into that tier.

Dirk Strider: I've already talked about this guy quite a bit. I have a fondness for Dirk's character and I think his dialogue and narration in meat do a good job portraying some ascended, ultimate version of his character without straying from his voice, the tone that makes him Dirk. That said, I'm a bit peeved that "normal Dirk", the one iteration of Dirk Strider that isn't total bonkers and just wants his friends to be happy, doesn't exist in this story. In Candy, Rose suddenly loses the memories of her alternate selves, but for some reason Dirk keeps those memories and soon after commits suicide; he's left out of the picture until Candy's postscript, which I guess is a reasonable balance considering his indulgence throughout Meat. But why is only one of the succulently verbose Strilondes let off the hook? Some readers imagine Dave as the comic's protagonist and Dirk as the antagonist; I've toyed with that idea myself and can see it symbolized, but it just feels so wrong to me. Maybe the authors did too good a job writing Dirk for me to be complacent with such a shift in role. His conversations with Rose were just as delightful as I had hoped and they aren't weighed down too much in light of his shift in role, at least not for me.

Alt Calliope: The narrative rival to Dirk, as I mentioned previously. I'm not totally sure what to say about her, other than that one could see her as a counterpart to let's say Anna Harley; a necessary piece in the Detective Pony analogy. Alt Calliope's narrative arguments with Dirk were hilarious and that's all there is to say on the matter.

G-TIER

I'm lucky Gamzee's name starts with a G, because this means I can give him a tier of his own worse than F. As an individual arc that is; he'd get a much higher rating when taken as part of a whole.

Gamzee Makara: Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. I despised reading every word that came out of this guy's mouth as soon as his """redemption arc""" started. But I can clearly tell that was the point and that the suffering that is reading his words has a much greater purpose. Before you deem me a masochist or the kind that insists everything is "bad on purpose", know that I am neither of those things but really do mean what I say here. Gamzee's role in Candy draws tension between individuality and the whole. Reading this guy's hogwash is suffering in and of itself, but ultimately it serves a role of showing us how fucked up the world of Candy is and helps the reader experience John's existential crisis with him.

F-TIER

As before, these tiers are strictly about character arcs in isolation and not the big picture. This tier is home to none other than the legendary...

Jane Crocker: Boy did I predict the future on that one. A bit like Dirk, I would've liked it more if in only one epilogue did sweet innocent little Jane become such a monster. No way in hell am I going to run through the asshole things she does; it's a load of sensitive topics I'm not comfortable discussing in any capacity. Instead, I'll say that if I had to choose only one epilogue where Jane ran through her crazy presidential campaign it would be Candy; as with Gamzee's arc, this campaign serves well as a part of John's existential crisis. What's weird here is that in Candy she originally cancelled all this, but later ended up basically doing it anyway with Dirk gone. I can imagine Jane going back to normal in Meat, maybe? Or in the hypothetical "true ending" I discussed prior.

D-TIER

Better known as "meh" tier. Mostly the characters that don't do much and I wished did more.

Meenah Peixes: Needed more screen time, god damn it. She survives the Furthest Ring apocalypse, nabs the Ring of Life, then makes her way to Candy Earth and joins Karkat in the rebellion. Maybe it makes sense that her and Karkat teaming up in war is relegated to the background, to show how far the shouty guy has come in comparison to everyone else. I'll come back to this point when I talked about Karkat.

Roxy Lalonde: Doesn't do too much in either side, but does go through some touchy topics I'm not sure what to think about; I'm most certainly not ready to talk about those topics now. And regardless, Roxy's role in the epilogues is better discussed when I talk about John and Terezi a few tiers up.

Calliope: Doesn't do all that much either, full circle to being the exposition alien with mysterious morality. I'm actually pretty OK with that. Certainly beats out the slog of endless "ur pretty" conversations. Calliope pretty much fades into the background on both sides, which is sad but fitting.

(About pronouns: I'll keep referring to Roxy and Calliope as "she" unless I find reason to talk about the little those two do in Meat. I just avoided using pronouns in those paragraphs above.)

C-TIER

Better known as "meh" tier, but with a more positive "meh" than before. It's the "meh" that indicates lukewarm satisfaction rather than annoyance at mediocrity.

Jade Harley: Really should be on a lower tier, because she did dick squat other than being horny and painfully oblivious to all the nonsense going on. But I'm a sucker for Jade being "Jade" and was happy to see even a trace of that early in Meat. As before, I'll avoid the controversial topics surrounding Jade in the epilogues, aside from pointing out that this post reads very different now.

Karkat Vantas: This guy's a bit of an odd spot. His leadership role is addressed in the absolute last way I expected. Could've gotten more attention from the story I suppose, but damn if his character arc didn't get the most triumphant return imaginable.

Kanaya Maryam: I touched upon Rose and Kanaya's relationship when I discussed the "buddy system" in my first epilogues post and I still stand by what I said there. Her strong attachment to Rose is integrated well into Meat without seeming like fluff or defining her entire character, because she actually does other things there too. In Candy they remain a stable happy relationship and I guess I'm cool with that.

Aradia Megido: Role is the same as ever and I'm fine with that. Death fangirl who works for predestination and has ambiguous morality. Her arc with alt Calliope ends with a cliffhanger that is easily the biggest reason to hope for a follow-up to the epilogues; if such a follow-up were to happen, I really look forward to hearing more from Aradia.

Sollux Captor: Sollux is by nature the other guy, that's an immutable fact of life. He doesn't do much other than snarking at whoever's nearby and I can't imagine it any other way.

Jake English: If not for a scene near the end of Candy, I'd put Jake at D-tier. Through all of Meat and most of Candy, Jake's role is one of the oddest spots of all and it's pretty hard to pinpoint what the authors were going for, lest I dabble in controversial topics some more. But Jake's scene with John near the end of Candy is uniquely touching and makes the most out of his role as a second John. He moves in with John, bringing his son Tavros with him, and encourages John to reconcile with his former wife and make amends of sorts, ultimately giving a small portion of the cast a pseudo-happy ending. That whole part of Candy made me tear up.

Talking about the really GOOD parts is a perfect point for me to move on to...

B-TIER

Stuff that didn't make it into A-Tier, which I've reserved for what struck me HARD.

Dave Strider: In both epilogues, Dave's behavior generally seems based on how he acted in Act 6 Act 6 Intermission 5, which is actually a LOT better than it sounds and hell if I know why that is. Dave's rants about politics and sexuality now have a charm I can't quite describe. His absurd fixation specifically on the economy matches shockingly well with the nature of Homestuck. The three-way romance between him, Karkat, and Jade goes in very different directions on either side, which I'll discuss a bit later. The epilogues even made Dave x Karkat an actually decent ship, how crazy is that??? The writers deserve a big badge of honor for doing that. Not sure what to say about specific things, but Dave was really well-written in an unexpected way.

Rose Lalonde: Again not sure what to say about anything in specific. Just really enjoyed reading Rose on both sides of the story. Shoutout to the heartwarming moment with John near the end.

A-TIER

Oh boy. Oh boy. Time for the big guns.

Vriska Serket: My mind hurts to process just how good Vriska's appearance in Candy was, after leaving the Furthest Ring and landing on Earth. First she talks with John rather aggravated, then she brutally murders Gamzee, then she sits down and has an honest talk with her ectobiological clone raised by Rose and Kanaya, and in the end gets in touch with Terezi which leads to a cliffhanger. The story somehow created the PERFECT balance of sincere reflections and typical Vriska flavor, which was deeply lacking in A6A6I5 with its horrific polar opposite versions of Vriska. Two Vriskas converse once again late in Candy and this time it's incredibly endearing and almost feels like an apology for the controversial Vriska/Vriska encounter back then. I accept the apology with open arms. Why is everything always so wonderful?

John Egbert: <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3. WHY IS EVERYTHING ALWAYS SO WONDERFUL? John gets a deep meaningful existential crisis arc in both epilogues; both cases I easily latched onto and found a bit of myself in. I absolutely loved seeing him and Terezi interact as a duo of people with some perception of canonicity; I'll get back to that point soon enough. John's marriage to Roxy not working out is a testament to both his issues with canon and Roxy's issues dealing with harsh situations. Roxy latches onto John and their son as a huge carefree pushover and he doesn't like that at all. And that's actually cool with me because John x Terezi is better in every way, as the epilogues made me realize. If that wasn't enough, the end of Candy spoils our little hearts by having John reconcile with Roxy anyway and give hope for a better future. Though a part of me does want to see a true happy ending where John and Roxy date with their delightful dynamic from their first interactions, I'm beyond pleased with the epilogues' handling of John either way. Swaying deep into some rather sad territory while remaining 100% faithful to his character that I've always loved so much.

Terezi Pyrope: FUCK YES FUCK YES FUCK YES FUCK YES FUCK YES. Every scene with Terezi in the epilogues was so goddamn awesome. Her interactions with John were such a blast to read, with exactly the mix of humor and touching aspects that make both of the big John/girl ships what they are. How did the authors pull it off, making deeply emotional scenes without ever sacrificing that goofy Terezi flavor???

S-TIER

S in rating systems these days is way misused in my eyes. Normally A is meant to be the highest rating and S is used for the very rare absolutely exceptional case A doesn't do justice. But now you see shit like SS, SSS, SSSS everywhere like one S isn't the ultimate badge of honor? S is a rating I'd gladly give Detective Pony and may or may not give cool and new web comic. Same goes for my very favorite Futurama episodes. I'd give a few of Neil Cicierega's works that rating if I'm feeling up to it. In this post, I've reserved the S rating for:

Barack Obama: THE BEST PART OF THE EPILOGUES, HANDS DOWN. His conversation with Dave near the end of Candy is perfect in every way, it really transcends words. Humor, emotional touching, plot revelations, and straight up "Homestuck feel" are blended into the most delicious melting pot imaginable. When Dave confesses that he might be gay and explains troubles in his three-way romance, Obama responds with a truly inspiring speech about identity that raises an excellent point about the differences between the epilogues involving aspects of people that may seem immutable to some. I think Obama's speech leaves a powerful message I never expected Homestuck of all things to convey so well. I hope readers take that speech's message into account, though I know many will probably be a bit naive about it.

If you refuse to read the epilogues at all costs, then I implore you to read Dave and Obama's conversation anyway. You won't be disappointed.

CONCLUSION

epilogues good

that’s all there is to say on the matter

though if you don’t like them that’s also fine

#homestuck #homestuck epilogues #epilogues #epilogues spoilers #homestuck epilogues spoilers #i predicted the future #i love john egbert #i love terezi pyrope #i maybe love vriska serket???#obama obama obama #johnrezi #yes good

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momestuck · 5 years

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Epilogues: Candy, Ch 22-26 [Epilogue 5]

/So a lot of heavy shit has happened, though worse is yet to come (I’ve been warned of an onscreen sexual assault in chapter 32).

Everyone’s been having babies and funerals! It’s a busy time.

(note: csa mention in chapter 23, though it does not occur in the narrative)

Chapter 22

This is another John-Terezi text convo chapter. There’s been a three-year timeskip. And... it’s raining ghosts now.

So I guess that’s what became of the whole ghosts in the Furthest Ring thing?

We also learn that, on top of the breeding restrictions, trolls are banned from rising beyond certain levels in government. Jane is, we learn, pretty much running the government behind the scenes, because what makes fascist movements tick is one evil person, obviously.

Karkat’s the one with a backbone at least...

JOHN: and karkat...

JOHN: he’s gone completely off the grid!

JOHN: at first we all assumed that the reason he ran away was because he got fed up with his shitty poly relationship.

JOHN: which was probably part of it, honestly. but now i keep seeing his face on all the resistance posters!

JOHN: i think they may have actually put him in charge?

TEREZI: H3H

TEREZI: 1 4LW4YS KN3W H3 H4D 1T 1N H1M

This situation is only exacerbated by the ghosts. So that means characters who were very definitely dead in the main storyline can show up.

Gamzee has been apparently spreading this religion of ‘redemption arcs’ by ‘making out with people’, and doing some kind of milk-based ‘baptism’. John, meanwhile, asks about the ethics of kidnapping baby Tavros from his horrific parents...

We get to bare witness to Gamzee ‘redeeming’ the ghosts of Feferi and Eridan. Which involves Eridan going on about Feferi’s feet and Gamzee mashing their faces together to make them ‘kiss and make up’.

Jane, it seems, is going full Condesce in more ways than one:

Just then, a dark shadow passes over the park. The crowd falls silent as they raise their heads to watch a drone ship pass by overhead. Its design is insect-like, splitting into many jagged branches, each decked out with weapons and cameras. It’s completely silent, and encased in armor with a bright red finish, smooth and seamless. It’s often cited by Jane as the crown jewel of Crockercorp’s various military contracts with the government.

...including literally building her spaceships, and sending them out over the Troll kingdom.

So we’re basically going to have the Holocaust allegory in here I guess? Fucking hell.

chapter 23

We get more words towards Roxy’s steady character dissolution...

It’s not like Roxy had ever been argumentative, exactly. He just seems to remember someone from his youth who was somewhat more contrarian in spirit than this person he’s married to now.

Back when they were dating, John thought she was acting a little off. Not quite in a bad way, but perhaps a little too “in love,” too fast. At least she still seemed like herself most of the time. But since the wedding, every year that goes by, she seems to become just a little more conciliatory. Not just toward him but toward life in general. She indulges Harry Anderson liberally and almost thoughtlessly. She doesn’t care that her best friend is slowly turning into an executive overseeing the corporate arm up the puppet ass of a ruthless dictatorship. She still thinks Gamzee is being sincere about all this “redemption” bullshit, even though he’s been casting an increasingly dark and hungry shadow behind Jane: a malicious royal vizier to her burgeoning imperial persona.

So John’s going to do something, and hopes that it will make things feel ‘real’ again... which is to say obviously what he talked about with Terezi, kidnapping/rescuing Tavros Crocker. Well-intentioned, but... I do not anticipate this going well.

We learn a little such as... Jane’s planning to outlaw human and troll marriage, which would retroactively hit Rose and Kanaya. Which I guess is the final straw for them. (Frankly it should be well past the final straw for all of them. They should all be with Karkat by this point!)

Also Jane and Jake are in ‘auspistice counselling’. We witness a loud row, in front of Tavros...

TAVROS: It’s fine,,, my parents are kismeses after all,,,

like, fuck.......

It’s a birthday party for Harry Anderson (John and Roxy’s kid), and Jane’s gift is, well, a fucking imperial drone!

sometimes I picture V’s gleeful face as we see the next thing she’s got for us... and now you lick the clown’s armpit... jane’s making the Holocaust but for fictional space aliens...

John awkwardly finds an excuse to be alone with Tavros, to convince him to run away. The kid dialogue is convincingly naive.

The possibility of child sexual abuse (by Gamzee) is raised, but it’s made clear this isn’t the case: what ever else Gamzee is in this version, he doesn’t rape children. However, that the situation is overall abusive in just about every other way is more than clear. Tavros, on his part, seems to be very keen to leave once he’s convinced John can escape Jane’s security.

I have a feeling the imperial drone may become relevant again shortly.

Jade, however, witnesses what John’s trying to do. She insists it will just make everything worse... (also Jake has an ‘execution dance off show’ because yeah...)

Whatever weird character corrosion has hit them is finally raised...

JOHN: if there was another way we would have found it by now!!!

JOHN: but there isn’t one, because everyone’s been all... brainwashed by marriage, or whatever the hell happened over the last few years that made things be this way!

JOHN: it’s like everyone just talks past each other all the time!

JADE: john...

JOHN: i’m the only one who ever seems to realize that something...

JOHN: that something’s WRONG!

Tavros sadly can’t get a word in edgewise as they start having a go at each other - John calling out everything that’s wrong, the way Jade forced a relationship on Dave and Karkat, and... and the noise is loud enough that Jane arrives on the scene.

John finally has a go at her with all the latent awfulness that’s been building up to this point. The fascism, the way she’s treated Jake, the Gamzee thing... the narration has put us very much on his side, centred his perspective, but his friends won’t hear it. And his windy powers destroy the room. So that’s something.

John runs away.

Comment: the mostly strict John viewpoint makes me wonder if there’s any degree of unreliable narration. All the same, most of the stuff is pretty undeniable.

chapter 24

This one begins with an interesting exchange:

JADE [alt-Calliope]: the timelines are interacting again.

ARADIA: ooh do you hear anything interesting

SOLLUX: don’t be s0 n0sy aradia.

To me the implication is that a lot of the ‘arrivals’ in this timeline - alt-Calliope in Jade’s body, the ghosts - are as a result of things that might be happening in the Meat story.

Through alt-Calliope’s eyes, we see Terezi and John’s conversation. Terezi is lost, in more ways than one, in the dreaming void searching for Vriska. She’s also experiencing derealisation... John, apparently in a mood for dropping harsh challenges, tells her point blank that Vriska is either dead, or, not worth her time for leaving her in doubt for so long.

alt-Calliope explains that what is at stake is not the destruction of this universe - but those of them here are ‘the lucky ones’, who live ‘beyond the reach of the prince’. She doesn’t bother to explain what is at stake.

Meanwhile, John and Terezi talk depression. There’s some really vital Terezi dialogue here...

JOHN: please. please come home.

TEREZI: TH3N WH4T

JOHN: umm, i dunno.

JOHN: we hang out and stuff?

TEREZI: JOHN YOU ST1LL DONT G3T 1T

TEREZI: 34RTH C 1S *NOT* MY HOM3

JOHN: do you really miss alternia that bad?

TEREZI: 1 D1D FOR 4 LONG T1M3

TEREZI: MOR3 TH4N K4RK4T 4ND K4N4Y4 D1D 4T L34ST

TEREZI: BUT 1 H4V3 NO 1D34 4NYMOR3

TEREZI: 4LT3RN14, VR1SK4, SGRUB

TEREZI: 1M SO CONFUS3D 4BOUT WH4T 1 W4NT

TEREZI: UGH, 1 THOUGHT TH4T NOT K1LL1NG H3R WOULD M4K3 M3 F33L B3TT3R

TEREZI: BUT 1NST34D 1TS L1K3 1 R3TCONN3D 4 HUG3 CHUNK OUT OF MY SOUL

TEREZI: 1 3R4S3D 4N 4CT1ON OF R3GR3T 4ND GR13F...

TEREZI: 4ND JUST TURN3D 1T 1NTO SOM3TH1NG 1 C4NT STOP CH4S1NG 4FT3R

TEREZI: M4YB3 WH4T 1 D1D W4S N3CESS4RY TO S4V3 3V3RYON3 3LS3

TEREZI: BUT 1T SUR3 D1DNT S4VE M3

oh terezi....

terezi is giving up. she tells john she texted, echoing his words, to ‘give him the courtesy of closure’. and that she’s going to let herself die, alone in the Furthest Ring.

this is the ‘sweet fluffy’ branch huh

chapter 25

finally an update on what’s going on with Karkat!

he’s been somehow appointed ‘Commander’ of the rebellion, with good old Swifer Eggmop as one of his comrades! I’m so glad Swifer is having a role. Karkat is not all that pleased about the successes of his rebellion:

KARKAT: SO FAR ALL THIS “TROLL REBELLION” HAS AMOUNTED TO IS A WHOLE LOT OF DICK ALL, WITH AN ADDITIONAL SIDE SERVING OF JACK SQUAT, FOLLOWED UP BY A FINAL COURSE OF GETTING TO WATCH OUR TOP ANALYST, CLIPER BORDEN, BEING FORCED TO DANCE TO AVOID LIFE IMPRISONMENT IN A LABOR CAMP ON LIVE TELEVISION AND MAKING A COMPLETE ASS OF HIMSELF.

It’s all a weird mix of surreal and grimdark, much like the Alpha kids’ backstory in Homestuck proper. There’s hard labour camps... making cake; a ‘pastry-based shadow dictatorship’.

Rose and Kanaya are at least involved somewhat in the troll rebellion, and transport of the Mother Grub has been arranged.

Anyway, Karkat’s typically grumpy internal monologue is interrupted by the sudden arrival of Meenah from another dimension. A living Meenah - equipped with a Ring of Life. John asks if she got it from Calliope, but Meenah insists she did not. (Possibly she got it from Andrew Hussie himself? I’d have to watch Cascade again probably...)

Meenah, it seems, is fresh from battling Lord English - apparently without success. But her massive army of ghosts arrives with her... and she’s willing for Karkat to take charge and order her around, as long as he does it with a suitably commanderly demeanour. Does this mean the rebellion now stands more of a chance? Meenah is ruthless (she was the Condesce in another life), though capricious... Karkat is honest and direct and angry about the right things, but rather prone to getting lost in it.

Also he still won’t text Dave, and won’t let Rose talk to him about it.

chapter 26

Back to John, who’s thinking about messaging Terezi again - presumably in the hope that she is not, in fact, dead?

He’s getting a good old mope on about the seeming fakeness, non-’canonicity’ of life on Earth C. But after some ‘melodramatic contemplating’ in this vein, he’s interrupted by his dad’s car.

I’m going to be very curious if the Meat route explains how all this stuff got into the Earth C universe.

Unfortunately, what John finds in the car is... not his dad, but a bit of Terezi’s blood. From which he concludes... he’s never going to see her again, there was never even a possibility of it.

Feeling derealisation more than ever, John just screams a lot.

Damn lol, this story is making me care about John Egbert of all people!

epilogue 5

This is the episode where the whole idyll comes crashing down. Things aren’t ok, things weren’t going to be ok, trying to pretend things were ok just made everyone miserable.

I am sufficiently depressed that that rather appeals as a narrative - much more than a ‘happily ever after’ ending. But it’s not over yet.

Hopefully there’s yet hope for the characters I like to find some manner of escape from this latest hell, develop out of the worst selves they’ve built... Roxy, at least, I hope can change, stop being this non-person...

#momestuck

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rainscribe · 3 years

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RP Drabble: Letters to Derek

<blockquote>characters: John Egbert (Jade’s universe, Homestuck), Various other characters relationship: John/Derek words: 7,491 location: Monster-au-stuck rating: Mature warnings: mentions of sexual content/desire, some violence mentions, but not delved into, mentions of an age-difference relationship. rough draft, un-betad summary: John goes on a trip to find all the trolls (except 2), and figure out what the hell he’s doing with his life through writing letters to the person his life has centered on for the past months. </blockquote>[[MORE]]<blockquote>june 17dear derek, </blockquote> so. jade said i should write you letters while you were gone and at first i  thought that was really dumb? but then a part of me was like, fuck yeah! i’ve never written a letter before. there was no need to, right? yet i always wanted to! even in middle and high school i would try really hard to get pen pals because that was the only way i could write letters. those never panned out. /: anyway, so i guess i’m just going to tell you how my trips are going! first of all, i haven’t actually traveled out of state yet? i’m on a bus right now heading out, but jade and dave kind of thought i already left to go to far off places. so i told them! hah. (dave kissed me goodbye. it was terrible. you should kiss me when you get back so i remember what good kisses are like.) i get distracted way too much. point is! i met some of the local trolls in this area. and a guy who kind of reminded me of you? but a looooooot younger and clearly has not gone through the same shit as you. and also a guy who was kind of shy but seemed cool. then there was this DOUCHEBAG of a SLEEZE. like seriously he was hitting on me the whoooooollllle time i was at latula’s auto repair shop. she was really cool! she knew karkat, this really funny, shouty troll that’s basically married to ava (you didn’t hear this from me, though!) wait. do you even know about trolls? like this is not the magical supernatural kind of troll. this is the alien kind of troll with candy corn horns and gray skin. eh, i’ll probably inform you about them before you even get this! if i give it to you. i probably should. the mail should always be delivered to its recipient! alright but so there was the douchebag whose name was cronus and he had an unlit cigarette in his mouth? he’s so weird. and he has scars like harry potter but he is such a fraud. i could kick his ass. i would have too! but this guy named horuss (another troll! 0: ) stopped me. and latula. there were like these three trolls around the area of the mechanic shop. and you know how much of a douchebag cronus was? well, he did kind of introduce me to meenah and porrim who are pretty radical people in their own right! he was like, ‘hey john, i bet you want to meet some a grade ladies.’ i kind of rolled my eyes, and reminded him that i was taken! he was just like, ‘that’s ok, that’s ok. these are trolls. i know how all about trolls you are.’ then he takes me out. like to dinner. he literally did. but i couldn’t say no? because he was going to take me to meet some troll ladies. i made sure of that. also, the restaurant he took me to was high grade shit. i feasted that night. and maybe got a little tipsy off of some really bubbly champagne? it was so light, my tongue danced. damn. i really need to remember what it was called? because i want you to try it! afterwards, his friends stumbled upon us, singing and laughing on the street towards their establishment. meenah was mad at me for some reason? i can’t remember but she still let me sleep on her couch. she’s very prickly towards me and then she stuffs my face full of pancakes. it’s hilarious. porrim is a bit more mature? but then she kicks everyone’s ass at mario kart. even latula! it was hilarious. then she and latula

got in a cuddle pile while meenah and cronus hooted before getting kicked out. it was kind of awkward to stick around after that! so i grabbed this bus, and i’m taking it down to las vegas. B) ill tell you all about it! im really more interested about the magic shows than the gambling, although, i’m curious to try my luck. o:love,johnnote: i wonder how good rose would be at gambling? note 2: the champagne was called ca’del bosco cuvee prestige brut, franciacorta for future reference! <hr><blockquote>june 19dear derek, </blockquote> heh i almost wrote deer. deer derek. that would be the exact opposite of what you are. so cute i’d eat you all up. and out. in a sexual innuendo-y way? damn. vegas is... not the best place to go alone? it basically throws it in your face that you’re a loser and alone. there’s strippers in pretty much every gambling house, and it’s like yeah ok that’s nice and all, but my boyfriend is so much hotter and i’d rather see him stripping? not that i stayed and watched. it was... awkward. uh. yeah... the magic shows were really cool, though! although... most of them weren’t reeealyl magic. but that’s the cool thing! theyre pretendin g to be magicians through sligth of hand and like foolin everyone. it’s ridicuoulously funny! i hahaha m laughi n too much. everything is hilarioius. hilarious. hiclarious. shit im too durnk to finsh this. looooovvev you wow that was embarrassing. i actually fell asleep on this letter. i’m so glad i’m not handing this over. this is amazingly embarrassing. las vegas is cool but bring a friend. moral of the story. love,john<hr><blockquote>june 21dear derek,</blockquote> i met kanaya. i feel like that should be a sentence in and of itself. its importance is there on the table for you to take it up, or just let it stay. in this case you’re going to pick it up because kanaya? is so amazing. like you’re amazing, but then kanaya is Amazing. she uses a fucking chainsaw to do like tree designs? she is a lumberjack in disguise as the classiest sith in existence? i feel like rose would have fun trying to figure out how that happened. speaking of rose she’s the one who told me to go meet her? as a favor for jade who knew karkat who is a worry wart. literal worry wart. he is a wart. but kanaya fed me and made me tea and was very nice in general even when i trolled her and she had nooooo clue! i pranked her. i know it was wrong. it’s bad manners to prank someone in their own house! but she was asking for it, derek! she was so... so... like okay she is sassy. the SASSIEST. but then she like stands so upright and makes you feel like you’re wearing a potato sack. which i would look amazing in. kanaya is just jealous that i can make a potato sack look good! >:) i just HAD to prank her. and when the bucket landed on her head... she blushed SO HARD. i took a picture. i sent it to karkat. his reaction was JUST AS HILARIOUS. like look at this shit: Karkat: JOHN. I’M GOING TO POLITELY ASK YOU TO FUCKING BLOCK ME FROM YOUR PHONE. FOREVER. JESUS FUCKING CHRIST. he actually blocked me! i can’t believe it!! rude!!! <hr><blockquote>june 23dear derek,</blockquote> i’m in texas!! i feel like i had to write you a special letter from this special state that you were in for like... twenty years? nineteen? i’m not even sure how long you were here for. anyway, so karkat finally unblocked me. long enough to school me in why it was rude to send bucket pictures of someone he regards as a friend (and maybe more?? he didn’t make it very clear.) to him. i guess it threw him in such a good yelling spree that ava says i’m banned from their house. :( i’m waiting at the airport right now. my flight should be here in a bit. i’m going to florida because that’s where the zombie apocalypse is going to start and i need to know the layout of the land, but

it’s kind of boring here. annnnd i may be in a grumpy mood because all of these people meeting and hugging is making me irritated. maybe it’s because i know i probably won’t get a similar greeting from you? that’s gross, i know. ew, john, pda. besides, jade and dave will greet me. maybe i’ll kiss dave. show him how a kiss should really be! not in front of willow, though. the poor child. we must protect her from the pda. my flight isn’t for another hour, and i’m so bored. i don’t even have anything interesting to write about except that i’m in texas. maybe i’ll draw you something? [insert badly drawn art of a wolf] hahaha that fucking sucks. sweet bro and hella woof. [new drawing of sweet bro on a hella jeff wolf] look at this fucking amazing drawing. it should be in l’ouvre. right? right? ... what... the fuck... WHAT THE FUCK, DEREK. HOW DID DAVE’S SHITTY WEBCOMIC TURN INTO A MOVIE. I WAS JUST LAUGHING ABOUT THIS, AND I LOOK UP AND THERE’S SHITTY JPEG PIXELATION OF SWEET BRO AND HELLA JEFF ON A BILLBOARD. how did his webcomic make it to this world??? IS YOUR LIL BRO RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS SHIT?? what the hell. what has come over the world that they would pay twenty bucks to see his webcomic come to life. holy shit. oh. well... that was an interesting way of wasting an hour. i’ll talk to you later.love you, john<hr><blockquote>june 24dear derek, </blockquote> FLORIDA IS TERRIBLE AND AMAZING ALL AT ONCE. seriously, though? fuck florida. i’m pretty sure everyone i met is secretly a crocodile. especially this toothy detective i stumbled upon. quite literally. i was just minding my own business being a tourist and she comes over like you just committed a crime! and i said what? because i’m pretty sure i wasn’t even JAYWALKING. and she said that she was pretty sure loitering around like a bumbling dunce was a crime in her jurisdiction and i said well if that’s the case then you should arrest yourself! (ooooooo!) she laughed. swallowed her donut. (whole! the whole fucking thing. i am not even lying. you can see it in action yourself!) then went to her police car, which was actually being driven by someone else. she’s blind, you see! which makes no sense on how she would know i was loitering! here i was hoping florida would be nice. :( but i guess it’s true. all floridians are secretly crocodiles. love, john<hr><blockquote>june 25dear derek, </blockquote> terezi pyrope is terrible. utterly. terrible. you know what the first thing she said to me was? like after the whole loitering business in the previous letter. she said, “ew, smells like dog.” and then she pinched her nose. like seriously? how rude! i mean, at that point she kind of knew i was a werewolf. see. she, well, she... alright! she fucking caught me naked, and was like that’s illegal and profane, get in the car. cause i guess she’s a cop detective. whatever. see what happened was... i didn’t have a hotel to sleep in? and i was like no big deal! i can live in the great outdoors in fucking florida and be fine! that was SUCH a stupid idea, derek, you have NO idea. first off, let me repeat myself. FLORIDA IS TERRIBLE. there’s CROCODILES, and SNAKES, and all sorts of evil things. why i thought it would fun sleeping outside instead of in a hotel, i don’t know, but i won’t make THAT mistake again. and you know what i did that was even worse than that? i shifted. i took off my clothes and shifted. when i woke up in the morning, i was butt naked and terezi fucking pyrope had my clothes held hostage. she was in jogging clothes then so i guess she was taking a morning hike in the park, and she spied me. then she waited until i woke up, and made the comment about how i smelled like dog, and that i was violating public decency laws!!! she almost threw me in jail. :( your boyfriend is a criminal, i am so sorry,

derek. but i got her back! for the smell comment, i mean. i was like well you smell like a bug so that must mean you’re a troll! she laughed, and took me to out to eat after giving me back my clothes. i got her up to date on what happened with karkat, and she asked about the guy whose glamour i had? i couldn’t really tell her much about that, though. just that karkat gave it to me, and that had her frowning. like she was concerned or something. beats me! she made some unnecessary rude faces at me, too. but i eventually convinced her to move to seattle because i’m awesome. and she told me that there was a troll up in canada that i should find? (i’m on a plane heading up there now!) she chuckled evilly, so i’m not sure if i trust her or what. also i’m actually not sure what bugs smell like? but that’s what trolls smell like. why does your universe have so many bug humanoids? even my alt is part bug. which is kind of weird! because i can’t imagine myself being a fairy. although, the fact that he’s a lightning bug is pretty cool. they’re charming bugs. if i had to pick a bug, i’d pick that. but it’s still weird! and i kind of wonder what dave’s bro was like in my universe! if i would have liked him like i love you. but from what dave has said, he kind of sounds like a total dick, and in the worst of ways, despite the way dave tries to make it SOUND positive. like i understand that he doesn’t want his guardian to sound terrible, and wants to treasure the memory, but he kind of is terrible! and abusive. and manipulative. (i don’t think i could love that kind of person.) but your dave said that he was getting some memories from my dave, so i wonder if you’re getting memories from his bro? i hope not. you’re supposed to be going through therapy to help you with your control. not needing more therapy to help sort out any fucked up memories that might have you confusing your own experiences. especially with dave. because i know that argument really had you questioning how you treated him! but i trust that you aren’t as bad as his bro. i know you’re not. honestly, though, sometimes i wonder why my dad lived while Rose, Jade, and Dave all lost their guardians and had to go through some sort of social services. like! i know i was adopted, too, but it happened when i was really young so i barely remember anything. when rose’s mom died, rose lived by herself, and actually did well maintaining the lie that her mom hadn’t died really well until she came to school drunk once. they found out everything then, and forced her to stay in social services until they found a good family (impossible when she was fifteen and no one wanted to adopt a kid that old), or until she was eighteen, and they couldn’t keep her. then you have dave who went through a couple of terrible people, and decided, fuck it, and escaped. of course, he ended up in a gang. jade said she ended up getting emancipated from the system. but that was after going through a couple of people, and being able to live off her inheritance. huh, rose received an inheritance, too. i wonder why dave didn’t? anyway. this letter has gotten kind of long and rambly, so i guess i’m going to cut it off here. the plane is landing soon in new york too. after that i will be in the country of the ‘eh!’ also, maple syrup. i should buy some and mail it to the house! yeah! we’ll make pancakes when we’re both home! see you later!love,john<hr><blockquote>june 28dear derek, </blockquote> man! new york is so cool! i went and saw the statue of liberty, and went up in the empire state building. it’s amazing! i was so high up!! i wish i could fly. it would be sooo cool. why aren’t there any flying werewolves? even dave can fucking levitate, but you don’t see him doing it that often! it’s a waste of being able to levitate! :( but!! i did see a magic show, and people did some moves through the air. they were attached to a

cord, i think?? (unless they were supernatural! O: ) and yeah they did some neat things. i want to do neat things like that. like fake flying. fake magic. i wouldn’t mind any of it at all. although real flying would be better than fake flying. oh, and there were a couple of other places i stopped by?? i actually decided to take a bus from new york to canada because i wanted to see niagra falls! it was being advertised as one of the biggest falls in the u.s.? even though it’s really not that big. they’re just long! but it was really cool. i even got to go behind the falls and got a rinky dink yellow rain jacket for my time. there were a lot of people getting married there, too. or proposing. i guess it’s a really attractive place to proclaim your love to someone? huge ass waterfalls in the background and a diamond ring to tell you i will love you for as long as the waterfalls remain. i wonder what would happen if the falls collapsed. would their love vanish? would their hearts break? this is why you can’t rely on physical things for love. not even the stars last forever. jupiter might, though. didn’t shakespeare do a sonnet about love? do i compare thee to a evening something or other. shakespeare died but his sonnets (and plays) will last forever. i don’t think i’ll be able to write something so powerfully gay to you, so i won’t. because i can’t write. i’ll leave that up to rose.love,johnp.s. don’t ask rose a general question like, did shakespeare write sonnets because she will chew your head off and read all of his sonnets to you.<hr><blockquote>june 30dear derek,</blockquote> i don’t... canada... ... i... words are escaping me. like tavros. TAVROS. is just as bad as terezi. he is terribad. but in this nerdy way that drives me up the wall. no wonder terezi was smiling evilly!! between her and tavros i’m at my wits end with these trolls!!! at least terezi was willing to move to washington. tavros was like ...hahaha... that sounds interesting but if you’re gathering up all the trolls, then i think not. and he goes back to playing the troll equivalent of poKEMON!!! and when i said that humans came up with pokemon first, he was all, trolls have been around longer than you have, so i’m pretty sure we came up with it first. i just can’t believe him! i’m so fucking glad i’m leaving canada!! john<hr><blockquote>july 2dear derek,</blockquote> i stopped by... well. your house as i was passing through on my way to hawaii! well technically, i’m on my way to japan. but i’m going to hawaii first! it’s going to be awesome! but i saw jade, dave, and willow on my way through, and it looks like they’re all doing fine! willow already has a tooth cut through and she’s looking really adorable. she has a lot more hair now. and her eyes have set on taking after dave’s. it’s about time some features of his started showing through. the harleybert genes are strong. B) i missed being there surprisingly! your bed still smelled like you. it is pretty big. hard to get all of your manly smell out of it no matter how hard i rolled around in it and tried to cover it up with my manly smells. :) it was actually difficult to leave! for like a day. then rose was like, john you must be in japan at this certain spot when the aligns to meet the next trolls, and i was like ok, cool! japan seems awesome. this seemed important! see, what i’ve kind of been doing with this trip is getting an idea of where all the trolls are at. they don’t necessarily have to move to washington (and if they do decide to do that, we’re having them live with mom!), but we’d kind of like to know a more specific location on where they’re all at. and maybe get updated contact information, lol. i think rose is even creating a group facebook so we can all keep in contact! which is a pretty fucking good idea. oh, and jim john is also working on it, too. so is

the other rose? they’re all very good at the whole predict-y thing. i don’t even know sometimes. they just tell me where to go, and i go. that’s all. not too much excitement going on right now, though! so i’ll talk to you later. after hawaii B)love,johnp.s. i’ll make sure i take a hot picture for you! B) <hr><blockquote>[Postcard with the Hawaiian islands on the side. Attached with a paperclip is a picture of john in regular clothes by a volcano. fireworks are going off in the background.]july 4derek! </blockquote>hawaii is fantastic! wish you were here! i hope you enjoy the super hot pic! xoxoxo<hr><blockquote>july 9dear derek,</blockquote> hey! i’m in japan right now! i am extremely sadden that there’s no anime japan. i was seriously thinking i’d see totoro here!! i’m so disappointed. heh, just kidding. but japan sure is different than what i expected. i dunno. i guess it’s just the language barrier that got to me? that oh i really am out of my country feel. it’s a good thing we didn’t go here first, or you would have worst off. cars are backwards AND a different language you can barely understand? it would have been bad, pfff. it’s still really amazing, though! i went to tokyo tower, and saw some of the sights. i ate ramen in a ramen booth and felt like naruto for a minute. that’s where i met rufioh! he’s a pretty chill dude. doesn’t seem to have much backbone, but i liked him. and damara! i liked her, too. she seemed pretty nice despite the illegal amounts of weed she smoked. is weed illegal in japan? i don’t know. but yeah she DEFINITELY did not want to come back. when i even suggested it, she gave me the vilest look, and if it weren’t for rufioh, she’d have... well. done really bad things to me! there was a summer festival going on, and i didn’t have a kimono, but i got to join in. damara looked really pretty in a kimono! she took it off shortly after it started and i think some people were kind of scandalized. not because she was naked, but i guess you’re supposed to look kind of nice for these festivals? and she was definitely wearing a very short school girl outfit with her midriff showing. she seemed pretty happy, though. i kind of feel really sympathetic towards her? for some reason? anyway, they let me stay for a little while, and showed me some of the other neat things about tokyo. it was nice. i liked learning about the tokyo you don’t often see about in anime. i feel like you would enjoy japan if you became more comfortable with traveling? i even bought you a shitty samurai sword, and shipped it back home. love,johnp.s. don’t tell my dad, but i tried the weed.<hr><blockquote>july 12dear derek,</blockquote> hey! i’m going to be doing a lot of traveling between here (tibet) to maybe europe? yeah. there’s just a lot of take-offs and landings that’ll be happening and shit gets boring, y’know? i have a long flight from here to california, though, so i’m hunkering in for a nice little ride. i hadn’t even considered that i could have been asking for first class tickets. sometimes it startles me that jade has SO much money that we could just... not even pay attention to what we’re buying and just buy a fuckton of stuff that’s like hundreds of thousands of dollars, or more! we could buy a fucking island and we wouldn’t even notice that it took a nice skim off the bulk of her money. one thing jade told me was that even for as much money they have, we’re still accumulating money, too? from the investments and stocks that were purchased, too. like her grandpa had a really good mind to money! also i think she’s taking an interest in checking on what companies we have stocks in, and seeing what we can do to change those companies for the better. she’s always thinking about the future and about what can be done better. it’s amazing. sometimes i wish i had about a sixth of the motivation she has. i haven’t really felt

like there was anything for me to do. i feel like i’ve been so GROUNDED that i don’t have any room to go forward or that there was anything i wanted to do. i guess... i feel like i’m stagnating. i’m not flowing or moving or learning or... growing? as a person. as a werewolf? i’m just growing duller and more inactive everyday and it’s driving me up the wall! it’s funny because i have been traveling, but the more i’ve been traveling, the more i feel like i’m not getting anywhere. ... i saw kankri yesterday? i guess he’s related to karkat in some way, but i don’t know. he’s definitely not how i pictured a relative of karkat’s acting? other than the never shutting up part. he turned down the whole move to washington thing, but told me that i should go to niger. so that’s where i’m going now. i’m tired. goodnight,john<hr><blockquote>july 18dear derek,</blockquote> hey. sorry i haven’t been writing. like i said... there were a lot of planes to change, and i mostly slept on my flights. i saw terezi again for a little while. crashed on her couch between a flight from california and a flight to morocco. she said she hoped i liked nepeta and that she’d chew my head off, hopefully. she was packing up, too, and showed me some younger pictures of glamoured, and unglamoured karkat. it was cute. i sent the pictures to ava who was more than happy to receive them, but karkat banned me from the house, so i’ve officially been banned by both members of that household. i feel sort of accomplished with that. after terezi’s, i went to morocco, which is absolutely gorgeous. the architecture and colors are divine. the market is really fun. i haggled with a couple of vendors, and manage to get some souvenirs shipped back, too. i make really good investments! nepeta was as cute and dangerous as terezi deemed her to be. she’s a werelion? but she only shifts when leo is in the sky. she can’t shift during any other time frame. she had fun hunting me down. i thought i was being fucking stalked by a literal lion, not a fake shifter lion (don’t tell her i said that, she’ll chew my head off). you’ll get to meet her. she said she was interested, and after i gave her some money for an airplane, she decided to head that way. then i went to egypt. i saw the pyramids, and didn’t get too taken advantage of. (who am i kidding. they took complete advantage. i can’t hide the fact that i’m an american tourist no matter how dark my skin is. i honestly don’t even mind that much, although i’m pretty sure they thought i was as dull as a rock.) they really like tea in egypt, too? which is kind of surprising, but it shouldn’t be. like basically anything non-western is all over tea, and westerners are all over coffee. pretty funny, considering how tea is supposed to be better for you anyway. egypt is hooooooooot, too. not hot like texas hot which is also kind of a wet and humid hot that makes you feel like you’re suffocating, but a heat that’s just really hot. which... is really weird to say. it doesn’t make you sticky, just sweat a lot. i can kind of understand why they wear a lot of clothes now! the clothes contain the coolness of your body in the heat, and also keep the sun off you. which is really good! but i didn’t stay in egypt for too long. i went to greece next, because nepeta asked me to check in on someone very impurrtant to her. he worked at a museum in greece which, yknow, showcased the greek statues and shit. at first, he didn’t seem all that interested, especially when i didn’t show proper respect to the relics of the ancient world. (which is funny because under his breath he’d mutter about how even what we considered to be great achievements for humans, they had very little on alternian achievements, especially in the fine arts.) yet, the moment i mentioned nepeta’s name he fucking clams up, and is like oh great master egbert what can i do for you? if only you’ll tell me where she’s at. so i told

him she was in washington, and i saw him run off to his work office to put in his two weeks, or tell them he was quitting or something. i don’t know. i kind of didn’t care at that point? i was just glad that it was taken care of. so that’s what i was up to until now, basically. it’s all been rather boring despite the sites. i’ve taken to couch hopping, and whenever someone tells me i should go somewhere, i just go? because what else am i going to do? i haven’t really heard anything from home, so i guess this will work for now. there’s a beer festival or something happening in germany tomorrow. i’m in austria right now, but i think i’ll stop by and see if anything catches my interest. love,john <hr><blockquote>july 20dear derek,</blockquote> heheheeeee i’mmmmm drunk agian. i met thsi girl trlol named vriask and we haad a fight! but with abeet bert. beer. tryin ta out do each other ykonw? and now i’m crasshed at her uh place? car? i dunno what it is. too big ta be a car??? i’m so confusde. anway dont matter. what mATTERS is the iMPORTANT things in lief. and how much i lovvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv vv vv ve ya. is that enogh v? i think so. viraks was tellin me abutt how she lovd the tavroos guy. idk why he sucKS but like shhe did? idk toot drunk to make out waht shes talkin’ about but it was funny. i think? i think everything is funny right now. except how fukcing turned on i am and how ur not here. i mayb cry bc your not here to help my bonr. but not really. just cry cause im lonely which is wierd. casue brskira is here yknow? id kiss you allllllllll over and jsut touch. idonteven want ta get off. nah thats a lie i toets do.hahaha vriska just belched gdo shes hialarioous. <hr><blockquote>july 28, 4pmdear derek,</blockquote> it feels weird not writing to you for so long! i’ve kind of been busy. and vriska won’t let me write to you when i’m drunk! (thank goodness, to be honest.) i thought i was going to be so bored in europe, but i’m like the exact opposite! it’s great. and a lot of that has to do with vriska. she has all these irons in the fire, and she asks for my input too, but i’ve kind of been traveling with her. she’s been helping me out a lot, too! she said i looked utterly pitiable and that i should be lucky that she’s going out of her way to help me. i know that sounds kind of mean, but vriska has such a personality that it’s hard for her to be nice to anyone if it doesn’t look like she’s gaining something out of it. it’s funny how hard she tries to make it look like she doesn’t care. we’ve been to so many places, derek, it’s hard to believe. europe is pretty. it’s done a lot of recovery since world war ii but you can see where it’s still affected some areas. we mostly avoided those areas. vriska said they were lame. so! we went and visited a lot of neat places. mostly breweries. vriska really likes beer for some reason? even in italy she just wanted to go to the wine houses! which was fine because while she was at the wine houses, i went to venice. i really wish you could see venice some day. it’s beautiful. there’s canals everywhere, and statues of different beings. i would have thought with it being such a magical looking place, there would be a lot of supes there? but it felt... static... of any magic. there was nothing really supernatural about it. i guess that’s because when people go there, they’re ready to believe anything. even if it doesn’t fit in with their world. we watched a bunch of wrestlers in rome. vriska gambled on a bunch of different teams, and won us a lot of loot. she didn’t seem happy when she learned that i was only bumming it around because i was bored, and not that i was actually broke. she got mad? like the money she made wasn’t important i guess. but i told her any money was good money, and that it technically wasn’t my money, and she got over it. she’s a prideful troll! oddly

enough, she’s been helping me with the whole stagnated feeling, though? keeping her in check is a lot more interesting! but i get the feeling that i’m just passing on the whole complete focus thing from you to someone else. (not like that, though. i don’t find vriska attractive in those regards!) but like in paris, we went shopping, and we splurged a little (sorry, jade!), then i went and did a little magic show to these kids outside with vriska and it was just?? really great?! i missed doing slight of hand. i made so many kids smile, even adults! it was unreal. then we went out and got some balloons and just aired up hundreds of them with helium before letting them go. i think france kind of hates us, now! they didn’t really like what we did. afterwards, we went out into the country where they were doing an air ballon show, and we actually got to ride in them! it was really great. right now, we’re heading to spain. she says she wants to take some pictures of bulls for tavros, and i’m pretty sure i understand where she’s going with that. (tavros has bull horns.) it’s pretty mean, but he’s also a douche so i can’t help wanting to do it, too. i think vriska was more than a douche to tavros, though, so i’ll let her take the pics, then delete the images when she gets drunk off her victory later. rose called and told me i need to go to england soon! so i’ll probably do that, but when i told vriska that, she made a face. she has absolutely no interest in leaving the continental europe, so i don’t know if i’ll see her in washington or not! i hope so. i really like hanging out with her. there’s only a few more trolls to get information from, though, so i’ll hopefully be home soon! i miss you, and i can’t wait to see you when i get back. although, i’m thinking i’m going to have to find more to do than just... did i ever tell you why i started traveling? shit! can’t tell you right now. tell you later. <hr><blockquote>july 28, 11pm</blockquote> sorry about that! our ride was about to leave, and we just got to our dinky hotel room. it’s so small! there’s two single sized beds, and like barely a closet of a bathroom. vriska chooses the worst places to stay. i think she either goes to the richest, most luxurious place she can find, or the scummiest. there is no in-between with her. but! we’re really close to the bull ring, and that’s a bonus. anyway, so. why i even did this thing. hell, you might learn before i even hand this wad of papers over. (still debating on that! especially the drunk ones. man, i don’t know if i was just lonely, or if i wanted to write some thirteen year olds smut fantasy... but... yeah. if i were writing smut, i’d probably mention something about your rippling abs. c; ) wow. i really don’t want to tell you this. so i’m going to do it, anyway. what happened, was that in my boredom, i found out some rumors that this one house outside the city was haunted, and so i decided to go to see if i could find anything. with jade. honestly, i’m starting to feel really bad about this because it was the night dave proposed and everything. like they had sex in the living room. with fancy cushions and marshmallow creme... i... don’t even want to know where they put the creme at holy shit. (we should do that...) so jade and i went out to investigate the haunted house and some kids were there, too. i think they were about fifteen or sixteen? maybe older, and well. when the paranormal stuff really started happening, i.. tried to scare them out, so i could face the ghost. by myself. or with jade. i just wanted to do. so the ghost got pissed off at me. because that was its job. not mine. and i ended up channeling some werewolf hunting instinct. jade had to cover for me, and thank goodness for the ghost because it stopped me from doing anything really bad. i know, i know, you’re going to berate and get onto me, and shit. DAVE

already did that, though, so you’re covered. please don’t berate me. the age thing will just make it weird. i wish it wouldn’t, but that’s... really the worst thing about the differences in our age! sometimes it feels like you’re lecturing me like i’m a naughty child when... i’m supposed to be your partner. /: i try not to let it get to me cause i know you don’t want it to come off this way! i can only hope the older i get the less weird it seems, but i don’t know if that’s going to be possible? i love you, either way, you massive nerd. anyway, vriska is nagging at me, and saying that it’s time for bed so we can go and take... blackmail? pics tomorrow. i don’t know how it’s blackmail when the content has nothing to do with the person, but instead in degrading way? i think she has that wrong, but she’s getting in her i don’t care, mr. grammar. excuse you, it’s not mr. grammar, but ms. grammar, and that’s rose! d: love, john<hr><blockquote>august 2dear derek,</blockquote> holy shit is vriska’s... relative... annoying. she’s like kankri, but at least some of what she has to say is informative? she kind of explained how the aliens got here, anyway. all like, our world was destroyed, and a massive amount of trolls had no where to go, our empire was dying, so our empress found this happy little earth planet, and decided to move in. if you can’t tell, i’m writing this as she’s talking. she thinks i’m taking notes. sike! i’m writing to my boyfriend under the teacher’s nose. :P it was actually interesting until she started talking about romance? i guess trolls have like four different kinds of romance. and i’m just like, oh yeah, that’s great. somehow it’s supposed to be better than ours, but i don’t really think it is. or maybe it’s just like people who want labels for everything? a better way to describe what it is you’re feeling? i don’t think i’m very interested in labeling what i am. i love and am attracted to you, but i also find ladies lovely and attractive, so i guess that technically makes me bi, but i’d rather just be john, and not have a bunch of labels stuck to me. i guess i can understand how other’s find them useful. some people like taking all sorts of online quizzes to put themselves in these little boxes! but i’d rather just go with the flow and be whoever i want to be instead of trying to pin it down to one thing! except if i were to ever be labeled as a wizard. i would OWN that. dammit. i better pay attention and find a spot where i can escape at so that aranea doesn’t keep me here for a month. i’m going to scotland, then ireland! last stop is iceland. 8) love,john<hr><blockquote>august 6dear derek,</blockquote> i think this will be my last letter! i’m on a plane heading home, thank goodness. i think vriska would have liked scotland and ireland more than me. i wonder why she was so anxious to not go with me the rest of the way? maybe she didn’t want to meet her relative? yeah, i’m like 99% sure that was definitely the case. hehehe i got in a brawl with a scottish dude at the pub, and afterwards we exchanged numbers and addresses when i told him that i had been writing letters during the trip. (he’s a werewolf too! it was SO cool. i wish i had gotten up to scotland sooner cause then we could have gone out on the full moon together, but he said it was probably for the best! he might have gotten too territorial to notice that i was a friendly werewolf. ... i’m trying to pull thoughts together, but i’m really tired. hold on... annnnd back. i just needed a nap. :) so scotland was a ton of fun! as was ireland! i got on a bus tour kind of thing? and basically, wow. ireland is like those covers you see on older romance novels (i saw them at karkat’s house!) where it was historical and shit, and there are lovely irish lasses who are taken in by i... don’t know. guys. dudes. (dudes with rippling abs. (; ) just to note, karkat may

have read one of them out loud to me. i may not have been listening in the entirety. then there was iceland, which was so relaxing. i went to one of the hot springs. i felt so clean and rejuvenated after that when i met nepeta’s relative, i wasn’t even weirded out by how she somehow managed to use her phone to gif at me as part of her sign language. i think i understood the hand motions better than what the gifs were supposed to represent? she asked about my love life, and was really bummed when i told her i was taken. and then she somehow was under the impression that i still needed other people? that was when the whole four romance thing clicked, and i was like shit. she’s going to try and get me hooked up in the other romances. i managed to get her side tracked by asking about her favorite ships, and her tumblr, and yoinked a phone number. i think it’ll be easier communicating to her on tumblr, to be honest. she and aranea didn’t seem all that interested in coming along, though, which is fine by me. the more those two plus kankri stay away, the happier everyone except maybe rose will be. i’m really excited just to come home! i can’t wait to lay in bed, and just... sleep for a couple of days. maybe you’ll be there? i kind of hope not in a way, i think i need to sleep for forty-eight hours at home in order to feel ready to talk to you. i’m acting like something happened between us? but i guess nothing really did. maybe i’m just still bummed that you left without saying goodbye? although, i get why you did it. either way, it’ll be good to be home, and i hope therapy is helping you out. love,john

#monsteraustuck;#rp jon egbert;#more than 5000;#rating: M;#derekjon;#roleplay;#complete;

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utopianparadoxist · 7 years

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man I don't think you can really say bro is brainwashed but gamzee's just evil when you can argue that gamzee's also possessed by cal. they even have really similar relationships to how he's formed, ie part of their souls exist inside lil cal already. which is probably a good explanation for how lil cal is able to brainwash them when he doesn't brainwash, like, dave, who is around him his whole childhood. idk, I just think gamzee's more complicated than "evil ass hole"

As it happens, Gamzee has a line I never gave much weight to before noticing Bro’s SAW interest that I’m more inclined to take seriously now, that suggests Gamzee and Bro’s relationship to Cal WAS intrinsically different:

But even if Bro is kind of a noble captor figure holding Cal back, I still wouldn’t think it excuses any of what he put Dave through. He’s still an awful dude.

As for Gamzee, here’s the main problem with reading him as “just” brainwashed.

Gamzee doesn’t require Lil Cal’s presence to go evil. In fact, Gamzee doesn’t seem to require ANYTHING to turn evil. But even if like, Doc Scratch ALWAYS teleports Lil Cal into Gamzee’s presence to trigger his personality shift, I don’t think it would matter.The weight of the sheer SCALE of Gamzee’s devotion cements his place as an ultimately willing accomplice/acolyte to Caliborn’s Dark Carnival.

And it kind of makes Gamzee fucking terrifying and a fantastic villain.

I’ll explain my reasoning here.

We know for a fact that Gamzee snaps and kills all his friends in at least one Doomed timeline. This is the source for half the code used in the creation of Doc Scratch. There’s no implication that Lil Cal is involved here at all.

But again, let’s assume Lil Cal was here again. It doesn’t matter.

Because there is canonically, explicitly, no timeline in the history of Gamzee where Gamzee ever, ever, EVER chooses to rebel. Gamzee Makara simply does not ever choose his friends over Lord English. In any timeline. Ever.How do I know?

Lets talk about Ghosts for a minute. The fandom has historically kind of taken these guys for granted, and loose fandom consensus is that they aren’t coherent/who has what ghosts is arbitrary. This is incorrect!

Pretty much everybody in the Bubbles that should have alt!ghosts does, including Meenah and Aranea, the two characters who’s alt!ghosts are typically presumed “Missing”.

This is important. The Ghosts kind of give us very low-key character development, and contextualize the characters for us. For example, Eridan is an absolute irredeemable bastard in the Alpha timeline. But in a God Tier iteration of themselves, Eridan and Feferi seemingly come to friendlier terms. In another, there’s suggestions Eridan makes up with Feferi and Sollux. In yet another, he seems to be Trans or exploring femininity at least.

The point is, there’s a certain fluidity to Eridan’s potential. Still terrible in the comic, but it’s important to remember that Eridan didn’t CHOOSE to be trapped in the meteor with Jack, or to be born to Alternia’s power system, or to be trapped in the Alpha Timeline.

It’s important to remember these things because in Homestuck, someone with power–Lord English–deliberately and willfully chose those things FOR him. Eridan’s lives are lived in response to that imposed power structure.These factors don’t redeem him completely necessarily

But anyway, the fact that the rest of the cast have coherent quantum expressions means there are only three real exceptions–three characters who either don’t have any ghosts at all, or should have more ghosts than they do.

The first is Caliborn, who’s timeline has exactly one deviation from the Alpha–apparently caused by John’s retcon. This riddle’s solved easily enough:Predomination doesn’t leave a ghost to appear in the bubbles at all. When Calliope says she ate his soul, she means that literally. Caliborn’s cheating in the Alpha Timeline is indeed the only reason Calliope exists in the bubbles at all.

(This, by the way, explains a lot about the relationship between Caliborn’s soul and Gamzee/Arquis’ in the Lord English. He predominated over them, too.)

The second is Vriska, who only has a single ghost in (Vriska). This is really weird, because we literally know for a fact she dies in more than one doomed timeline! As with the two Calliopes, I think this is down to John’s retcon doing some weird entanglement nonsense to Vriska’s quantum existence.The point is: Where others have a palette of possibility, Vriska has two extremely polarized halves. Schrodinger’s Vriska.

Important to mention that just like Eridan, the structure of the Alpha Timeline that limits potential Vriskas is IMPOSED ONTO HER. Vriska didn’t want anything about the way she was raised or where she was born. She didn’t ask John and Terezi to retcon her into this bizarre state. Both Vriskas, like the rest of the cast, are rolling with the punches LE has seen fit to give.

Except for Gamzee.

Hussie literally tells us Gamzee never dies. His single non-Alpha Timeline death in [S] Game Over is retconned by John, and Hussie suggests it straight up doesn’t count. But that presents a problem.

There are thousands upon thousands of Doomed troll timelines. How is it that Gamzee specifically never ever EVER dies? Well, there’s only one real way that a Non-Time player can survive a Doomed timeline, that we know of:

Dream self merger. By going to sleep as the last player present in Sburb, the Doomed Rose from Davesprite’s timeline triggers a game mechanic that ends her timeline completely and merges her consciousness with that of Alpha Rose through their dreamselves.

If Gamzee survives his doomed timelines, this is the only possible way how. And collapsing all of his potential instances into a single Alpha identity certainly sounds like the reduction of possibility commonly attributed to the Rage aspect.But what that means is that to move on to the Alpha, every Doomed Gamzee must inevitably either snap and kill all the other trolls, or somehow outlast them. And it means that if any Gamzee had EVER, in the entire spectrum of plausibility the Alpha timeline affords, EVER been inclined to rebel against LE–then we would know. Because somewhere out there, that at least Hussie could see, there would be a Ghost to show for it.

But there isn’t. Similar in this respect only to Caliborn, Gamzee simply has no alternate deviations because he doesn’t want them. He chooses the path that leads to Lord English freely and willingly, over and over and over again.

And like Caliborn…

Gamzee does this because he wants to.

Gamzee doesn’t BELIEVE he’s going to become his own God–he knows it for a fact. He sees it in Lil Cal’s mangled soul. And he embraces that truth wholeheartedly, throwing himself into the acolyte role from then onwards and presumably following instructions Doc Scratch gives him throughout Act 6.

Which we can talk about some other time. The point is: Gamzee chooses all this. Whether or not Lil Cal causes him to is beside the point, because there is not and never will be any timeline where Gamzee chooses to resist.

Gamzee is the ultimate in shitty cosmic nazi religious zealots, and devoted to the very power structure that causes every other character to suffer so. There are no mitigating factors for him as there are for everyone else but Caliborn. At the end of the day, he’s evil.Bad clown. Worst enemy.

#Anonymous #Gamzee Makara #Caliborn #Vriska Serket #Retcon #Lord English #Homestuck #Homestuck spoilers #Gamzee #Eridan Ampora #Aranea Serket #Meenah Peixes #Analysis Asks #My MSPA Analysis #long post

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thehopeymage · 6 years

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Classes: Thief and Rogue, Knight and Maid

Alright, so, to start off my more open approach to posting here, I’m going to start with my general theory's on Classpects in general, starting with Classes!! Unlike Aspect, which everyone PRETTY MUCH all agreed on how they were paired before being canonized, Class is kind of something no one TOTALLY agrees on. Id have a hard time finding anyone who agrees on everything about class details, inversions, and pairings. So I’m gonna start with that!! First, something no one particularly disagrees with...

The Stealing Classes, Thief and Rogue!

This is pretty well agreed upon because it’s one of the class pairings that had been canonically confirmed!

Wile Calliopes theories has been shown to be about as credible as any of ours (Ex: Gendered Classes), but this seems VERY plausible!

Thieves, being the Active class, steal their Aspect from others! This can be seen by Vriska (Thief of Light) stealing Luck from enemies and thus having MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF LUCK!!!!!!!! It isn’t CLEARLY seen from Meenah (Thief of Life), other then BRIEFLY during Collide, but we can see it metaphorically present in Her Imperious Condescension when she enslaves multiple people and subjugates her species!

Rogues, being the Passive class, steal their Aspect NOT NECESSARILY FROM PEOPLE and distributes it to the team! This can be seen by Roxy (Rogue of Void) when she steals the nonexistence from the Matriorb and gives it to Kanaya! These traits aren’t seen very clearly in Nepeta (Rogue of Heart) and Rufioh (Rogue of Breath), and I theorize that this is because they haven't denied their aspect! You see, Roxy denied her Aspect when she quit her drinking, committing herself to clarity! Whereas Nepeta struggles when shes pining over someone and Rufioh suffers with his general attitude of just doing what he wants and going with the flow. At least that’s my interpenetration of why! This leads me to believe that the quest of a Rogue is to rebel against their aspect, (Being called a Rogue, it makes sense) and not play by it’s rules!

Now here comes a theory Idk if a lot of people will agree with me on lol

The Protecting Classes, Knight and Maid

This is a pretty good group because we have two Players of the same aspect in this pair, Dave (Knight of Time) and Aradia (Maid of Time) and we also have two players of the same Aspect and opposite class, Jane (Maid of Life) and Meenah (Thief of Life)!! If you think this theory is totally bull already, please hear me out.

Knights, being the active class, weaponize their Aspect to protect their Aspect! Offence is the best Defense, so to speak! You can see Dave literally weaponize his Aspect when he uses changing his swords placement in time to better defeat enemies! Dave is very careful to keep the Alpha Timeline safe, and Karkat does a lot to help the safety of the team, like prohibiting sleeping or leaving the room (Which almost no one followed but still). Now, although we get the best specifics on Dave’s journey, we can pretty clearly see that Knights tend to have some sort of insecurity or something along those lines that they keep up a shield to protect themselves from. This can form in many ways! Literally, Dave keeps on his glasses to hide his emotions! Metaphorically, he keeps up his cool kid shtick to appease Bro. Literally, Karkat keeps his text gray to hide his mutation, but metaphorically Karkat keeps up his anger and shouting to convince everyone he is a ruthless and badass leader. and Latula has a r4d front because shes insecure about not being a kickass enough girl. I believe that shows a Knights quest is to let down their shield (Metaphorical not literal) and use their Aspect to strengthen them!

Maids, being the passive class, protect their fellow players with their Aspect /protect their Aspect in their fellow players! We can see Aradia do this by freezing Jack to buy her team time, and we can see Jane do this with her revival powers! I think Maids gain general defensive abilities! It seems that Maids typically get walked on by their Aspect OR for their Aspect. Aradia was walked on by Time in the form of death and used by DD for Destruction. Jane was walked on by Life during the events of their session when Jane gets ignored by her friends (except Roxy because shes good and pure). I think a Maids quest is to stand up to 1.stand up for themselves(/against their Aspect in some cases) 2.accept the bad things about their Aspect and 3. accept their aspect in their lives! It’s a weaker connection then the Knights, but to me it makes more sense then Healing and Creating given what we’ve seen in cannon 0u0

Why these pairs?

I think these two class pairs are the best candidates to be opposite of each other! Stealing being the opposite of Protecting! We can see the thieves steal their Aspect from people, whereas Maids are protecting it from being destroyed or taken away! Thus, we can see Knights fighting to defend their Aspect, and Rogues trying to take it for redistribution 0u0

With this theory, Karkat inverts with Rufioh! This may be a bit of a stretch because its based on very little cannon info, but Karkat enforces the connections of his team, whereas Rufioh helps the "Lost Weeaboos" by encouraging their individuality! (We dont actually know that much about Rufiohs experiences with the Lost Weeaboos because Meenah kept shutting Aranea up.)

Also, it’s pretty cool that the Maid of Life ended up fighting the Thief of Life!! Jane tried to protect her friends lives, wile )(IC was trying to steal theirs... Neat!!

Thief Inverts with Maid

Rogue Inverts with Knight

Feel free to message me about any of this, I’d love to discuss!! :^D

EDIT:

Okay so this has been my first LEGIT classpecting theory post, so of coarse it’s a little weak, so I wanted to strengthen it a little before moving on! I had a lengthy discussion on the rad @godtier-mods Discord server with some very smart/dope peeps ( @creative-classpect and Taksy as well as Vivs and J, if you want me to link your blogs hit me up, I just couldn’t find links to them for some reason??) and I thought this theory needed an addendum 0u0.

First things first, Inversions!! I see a lot of people interpret her decapitating the frog temple a sign that shes inverted to a Destroying Class, but, what she did was use the data in the frog in the Kernalsprite and fused herself with it, effectively stealing it, inverting to Thief! Additionally, we can actually see Vriska invert to a protector of Void! This can be seen by Vriska making sure to keep Tavros useless (Him only being able to do anything when she isn’t around.), and also by keeping everyone in the dark, notably what she was actually doing during [S] Collide. Additionally, this one I think is maybe less solid, but the pre-retcon Vriska (Vriska) wanted to stay irrelevant!

And now the pairs!! There’s no real need to get into the Thief-Rogue pairing, but I think theirs a lot to be said about the relationship between Knights and Maids! The best way to compare Dave and Aradia, Knight and Maid of Time!! Along with the fact that you could see them as serving classes (Dave serving the timeline and Aradia serving the dead), they can both be seen protecting the Alpha timeline in different ways! Dave, being the active Knight, aggressively stopped any and all possibilities for doomed timelines, every doomed timeline being seen as a set back to him (Dead Daves are the Enemy!!), thus effectively preserving the Alpha timeline!! Meanwhile, Aradia and the Aradiabots passively allowed many doomed timelines, using them as a tool to protect her team, often times using them as meat(metal) shields, and defeat the Black King! This could also be seen as the Knight Actively preserving the timeline by eliminating any and all doomed timelines they can, and the Maid passively allowing the doomed timelines to serve the Alpha!

Whew, I think that enough for addendum. Again, I am more then happy to discuss with anyone or answer questions about what I think 0u0. If I really feel the need to add more I’ll just make a new post >u< idk. I think i’m gonna do my next theory on Pages, their pairs, and their inversions. If you thought this one was too against most Classpect theories... you probably wont like that one either lmao. But I think I've formulated some very good reasons for it 0u0

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ghostlybearmilkshake · 6 years

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@annoyedlord is the reason i’m doing a homestuck crossover in 2018

Get Ready for Yansimstuck ideas !!

(long so more under the cut)

John is Senpai. Does not care about the rumors (ho you murdered your friend, it’s ok we can still date) but still cares enough to reject a -100 rep (cf. breakup with vriska and #notahomosexual) “What do you mean in love! the heart on this bento is clearly a frienship heart. aaaw it’s even written “ I love you”. as a friend. so cute.“

Dave is Midori but instead of questions he shitposts. He actually wears midori's uniform because he looks amazing in a seifuku. Sometimes two different Dave show up at the same time and panic ensues

Rose is the head of the Occult Club but unlike oka she’s proud of it and threatens people with curses and sacrifices while being perfectly poised. Goes to prides with a sign that reads “you were right. we are witches. and now we’re pissed.” does not have a crush on senpai because she is #notaheterosexual. Kanayas girlfriend

jade is the head of the science club. explosions. lots of them

Aradia is placeholder-chan. Member of the occult club when she was alive and she was H Y P E D about death. Her greyish shade, monotone otherwordly voice and eyes staring into the Void are her ways of showing excitement

Tavros is a member of the gaming club though he plays card instead of video games (except pokemon which he played every and all existing versions and forms of the game). is bullied.

Sollux is annoyedlord’s gema. Head of gaming club. Does not care. Does not want to care. Just want to code. Go away. NO HE WON’T MAKE AN OFFICIAL REQUEST FOR THE CLUB

Karkat is osana. “MOVE IT FUCKASS I’M NOT GONNA STAY HERE AND WAIT FOR YOUR WEAK FLESHY LIMBS TO CARRY YOU ALL DAY” enoguh said

Nepeta is the art club leader. Would like to paint with blood. is not allowed to. but she would like to. but she can’t. but it’s hers. but she can’t. Cats paintings are OVER 9000

Kanaya is a member of the drama club and makes all the costumes. Rose’s grilfriend. “why do the school allow an occult club they’re such a bunch of cre- OW Kanaya watch out with these needles! “ “Oh So Sorry Darling. Perhaps If You Kept Your Mouth Shut Instead Of Talking Such Nonsense You Could Focus On Not Fidgeting.”

Terezi is megami. Annoyedlord perfectly understands why this is perfect “ *L1CK5* 41SH1 WHY D0 Y0U T45T3 L1K3 BL00D? >:?"

Vriska is Osoro. doesn’t care about the rules, tries way too much, likes to wear jackets, will kill you if you attack her. Student council can’t do shit about her “Soooooooo Student Council President, what are you w8ting for to give me detention” “ S3RK3TV YOU NEVER GO TO DETENTION >:|” “::::D”

Equius is a member of the student council. He likes the president’s policy on STRONG discipline but hates that they can do nothing about the delinquents

Gamzee. Tried to be a delinquent but his pompadour wouldn’t hold up. tried to join the occult club but rose’s cat starting hissing when he entered the room. Then rose started hissing. tried to join the art club but would creep other members out and got kicked out on decision of student council. Current member of the cooking club. “how do you pass your exams you never go to class” “MoThErFuCkInG MiRaClEs BrOtHeR”

Eridan is a member of the student council. always pushes to expell or kill the delinquents or even underachieving students. has a crush on the entire school. Perfect for matchmaking

Feferi is mai Waifu but is a social butterfly instead of a loner. Is -EXCIT-ED about her glub club although it’s not an official one. is really popular in the school. strong opponent to bullies

Jane is the leader of the baking club. Pretty popular but unlucky when it comes to love. accepted gamzee and already regrets it. Useless BisexualTM

Dirk is a member of the science club. Helps cleaning the explosion. The rest of the club is entirely composed of his robots

Roxy is a member of the gaming club. She competes with sollux on coding. She sometimes helps the science club. Sneaks alcohol into school that somehow flies under the student council’s radars.

Jake is Budo. He is hyped about self defense and heroism but he needs to chill out and work on his agressive recruitment methods. trains to beat the science club members aka robots and Dirk. And jade sometimes throws inventions at him. Which explodes. The school staff is very tired of their “light spirited strifes between chaps”.’’

Damara is ghost girl. She knows her murderer’s descendant is in the school and she is revengefull. There will be blood

Rufioh is Asu Rito. he likes to enlist his friend into the sports club. As the club’s leader he’s very popular and he knows it

Mituna is a delinquant. 2cool4school. He needs helps with his pompadour in the morning which he will immediatly ruin with his helmet but he’s cool so they don’t kick him out of the club. Also latula would kick their ass and Vriska thinks he’s fun

Kankri is a member of the student council. Uses his whistle in the library when students are too loud. gets kicked out of the library for whistling. Strongly opposes bullying but his constant remprimands on socialy unadapted student can sometime appear as similar. also tends to encourage self-loathing instead of actual recovery. “Th9ugh I d9 enc9urage dial9gue instead 9f vi9lent means, have y9u c9nsidered that entering a therapist’s waiting r99m with scarificati9n marks c9uld be triggering t9 the 9ther patients ?” “OMG K4NKR1 NO SHUT UP D:< !! K1D YOU GO S33 4 TH3R4P1ST. 4ND NOY TH3 SCHOOL ON3 SH3′S 4LW4YS DRUNK.”

Meulin tried to enter the occult club but rose said she didn’t have The Call though she may have hidden motives. pretty popular since she’s sweet and with an upbeat personnality though few people in the school know sign language. having Terezi give her the school tour when she arrived did not seem like a good idea. it wasn’t

Porrim is the leader of the drama club. “you can’t play hamlet, you’re a girl and you have piercing and tatoos.” “The fact that yo+u think that shakespeare wo+uld disapro+ve of piercing and tato+o+s is but the pro+o+f that yo+u understand no+thing o+f Shakespeare. As fo+r being a girl, if yo+u can’t play a man, what cho+ice do+ I have but to+ play it myself ?” “Kurlo+z my dear these stiching are dreadfully made go+ see kanaya she’s work something o+ut”

Latula final member of the gaming club and and delinquent. actualy aims to being a professional player. Comes to class on skateboard. Mituna’s girlfriend.

Aranea is Kokoro. She acts really sweet and helpful but knows all the gossips and talks behind the back of everyone. meenah trusts her. She probably shouldn’t

Horrus is a former member fo the science club which he left for the sports club when Rufioh became the leader. is very insecure about himself and his choices, kinda miss the science club but trusts Rufioh.

Kurloz is a member of the occult club. obsessed with demon summoning. Would probably be bullied if he didn’t scared the shit out of everyone. Rose constantly keep him in check and refuses that his girlfriend joins the club. Meulin’s boylfriend

Cronus is Spiky. Great Master of The PompadourTM. Tries too much. Pretends he smokes. His big brother actually kills people. Was the delinquants’ leader before Vriska arrived “Back off doll this ain’t a place for a chick like you. Unless, you came to see m- OWV STOP PLEASE THIS HURT” “::::D”

Meenah is Musume. Loanshark’s daughter, mean, filthy rich, doesn’t like to do boring stuff and has her yes on senpai to kill him.

Pop is the headmaster and instead of a tazer he uses pranks

Mom is the teachers. all of them. and the nurse. and the psychiatrist. at least she’s not the lunchlady. probably not.

Bro is ayano. He is a creep. And a dick. And an abuser. and a dick. annoyedlord would like me to let you know that Bro is also a dick

Grandpa is the sport teacher. he uses tigers and cheetas to make his sudents run faster

dad is the policemen. All of them. The entire policeforce of the town is dad. at least he’s not the lunchlady. probably not

nana is the detective. she’s probably the tunchlady

Lil Cal is Ryoba

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chimericarchitect · 6 years

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((Terrible and Saness discuss the recent trouble she’s been having with her guardian and possible solutions to those problems. There are a few trigger warnings for this chat, including head stuff, manipulation, mind control, amnesia, suicide (sorta), and death in general.))

flippinOptimist[WIR] - Today at 11:23 AM FO: chirp? Saness (sanesspsuede) - Today at 11:24 AM SP: Sorry, I was distracted by a musical interlude. SP: I was gonna ask "what do you want to know" but you'd probably have a hard time forming specific questions without something to base it on. SP: So, uh, you wanted to know why that strategy was the strategy I've got going. I'm not actually set on it because I don't like it as a plan, but I will probe my options before taking action y'know? Even the ones that suck. SP: Anyway, Anista is a golem or something. SP: And it sucks. flippinOptimist[WIR] - Today at 11:30 AM FO: totally, checking out your options is the smart thing even if some of the options are horrible bullshit. you wont know exactly how bad an idea they are if you dont check FO: i usually bring up the worst idea first when im tryin to solve my own problems, just so i can cross it off the list... FO: that does suck. i could tell there was something going on in her, but ive got no idea whats in there. FO: was she always a golem? Saness (sanesspsuede) - Today at 11:34 AM SP: I think so. I'm guessing a little bit on that part. Context says probably, because I did a thing and almost got wiped so she got replaced with a Brand New Anista Golem that functioned like she used to, meaning that she's acting like a full person again instead of a zombie. flippinOptimist[WIR] - Today at 11:53 AM FO: uh, yikes FO: you okay there? FO: and who or what replaced her? Saness (sanesspsuede) - Today at 11:55 AM SP: I'm... uh, yeah. SP: It's just a thing. SP: As for the who/what in charge of replacing her, I'm not quite sure. They're a lot bigger than me, but I'm not willing to say "horrorterror" without evidence. I'm not experienced enough to tell. So, for now, it remains a mystery. SP: If you meant "what is she now" then the answer is "a seemingly normal troll who is constantly keeping tabs on me and probably ready to dropkick my pan at the slightest provocation." flippinOptimist[WIR] - Today at 12:01 PM FO: misc eldritch thing #1 it is FO: yikes, thats p shitty FO: if i ever catch you acting different, do you want to give preemptive permission for me to sneak over and try to return you to this state? FO: or like, to come check and make sure any changes are Legit Things You Wanted And Are Fine With Saness (sanesspsuede) - Today at 12:03 PM SP: That would be pretty great, if you don't mind. flippinOptimist[WIR] - Today at 12:04 PM FO: fuckin anytime, dude, ill set myself a timer to peek at your blog once a week. make sure to delete the logs of this convo in case she peeks at your computer FO: okay so, something happened, and she wound down enough that she stopped working. but then something else happened, and now shes back. FO: is she winding down again, or is she going to stay at full capacity? FO: did the thing that put her together like this get distracted and wander off forever, or did it wander off and then come back? Saness (sanesspsuede) - Today at 12:10 PM SP: There is no evidence suggesting that she is in a state of decline, presently. She was fine and seemingly normal for the entirety of three sweeps before she turned into the zombie fake-o person. My current hypothesis is that she... wears out? Like a timer, or an old battery or something. SP: The thing that did this obviously isn't hanging out 24/7 or I probably wouldn't be me already. I think Anista-Golem is like a watchdog or something for whatever-the-fuck eldritch doodad the first. SP: A lot of that is gonna be speculation; I don't know much about the big guy. flippinOptimist[WIR] - Today at 12:14 PM FO: yeeahh...(edited) FO: yeah you need out of there dude FO: and you need out of there in a way that they wont notice FO: so i can see why the death thing is a thing FO: i wish id known about this while you were still seery, then i coulda asked some questions an gotten pokey about a lotta fuckin FO: theres a lotta unknowns here and a lotta things that Could branch how this goes If they are true FO: ... shit is p whack, friend. anythin i can do to help i will Saness (sanesspsuede) - Today at 12:18 PM SP: Thanks, Terrible. I really do appreciate it. flippinOptimist[WIR] - Today at 12:22 PM FO: this one time my life sucked total ass, and someone was nice to me at exactly the right time. and i decided that maybe being nice to people wasnt stupid, and that it was nice that there were people like that around. so i decided to be someone like that. FO: this shit is exactly why. Saness (sanesspsuede) - Today at 12:23 PM SP: It's a good attitude, in my opinion. I prefer to help people when I can. SP: Before I go on about my plan to get out of here, there's a bit more to this yet, of the things I know. SP: One of the reasons I trust my death-note-suggestion from the future-past is because, like I said, I almost got wiped. SP: If I hadn't been all godly when it happened, it might've worked. Probably would have. SP: Anyway SP: I was getting erased, or blocked, or something (gross and weird) because I was messing with a mind wall (maybe?) and I got caught. SP: So maybe I need to disconnect from whatever I'm tethered to. SP: It's what I'm guessing, anyway. I'd prefer not to do the dying thing, obviously. flippinOptimist[WIR] - Today at 12:24 PM FO: B( FO: yeah, obvs. FO: im guessin you respawned once, but also dont remember parts of the anon? FO: is there other stuff that feels not solid? FO: the healer chick would need a small piece a you but hair or blood would probably do it, and she could rez you from a distance on command after that. shed just need to know when Saness (sanesspsuede) - Today at 12:41 PM SP: Most of the not-solid is from my memories. I don't remember a lot of stuff, it seems. Other stuff has to do with Anista and the generator. SP: Oh wait. SP: The generator. That's an okay idea. In tandem, not separately. SP: I'd need to put Anista out of commission for a bit though. Hm. SP: Can you tell me a little about the healer lady? I trust you, but I've never spoken to her I don't think. Is she a God Tier as well? flippinOptimist[WIR] - Today at 12:43 PM FO: yeah. shes a meenah, Meenah Peixes FO: long story short she lives in sparks's universe, and she's kinda low key and staying out of the spotlight. does a lotta bakin, some healin for pay. FO: shes kinda mercenary but i think she cares about dudes once they catch her interest, which most dont FO: the universe shes in has legal limes, crimsons, and wings, and no caste system, so theres no problems on the mutant front FO: i could vouch to be there and supervise 100% of the rez process if you trust me enough for that an itd help any Saness (sanesspsuede) - Today at 1:00 PM SP: I don't know if that will help any, but I appreciate the offer and I'll keep it in mind. SP: I considered whether or not, as a Prince of Mind, you'd be able to bust shit up so I could skip the not-being-alive part, but that seems less likely to work and more likely to get you smooshed by the eldritch fucko. SP: Besides this stuff, I'm trying to convince a pal of mine to go off-world with me before they fuck up and start a sgrub session. SP: None of my timeframes are defined, so it all feels kinda like it has to be done immediately. Am I gonna get wiped? Is my friend gonna blow up this Alternia? I don't know what's happening first. SP: I think I'm rambling now, sorry. SP: More useful thing, practical type. Do you know the charging rates on resurrection? SP: Which is a funny sentence, by the way. flippinOptimist[WIR] - Today at 1:04 PM FO: fightin an eldritch fucko would be a heck of a fight, but its one id give a go. ive done it before, ive pulled that kinda shit outta dudes heads. theres a big variance on how big an individual eldritch fucko happens to be though, so its a thing to take super fuckin seriously before blunderin straight into FO: if anybody could cut a mind connection, id probably be able to though FO: ramblin makes sense, and bein in a hurry makes sense too. why is your friend on the verge of startin a sgrub session? do they like, know not to? -- flippinOptimist began sending file : meenahsfliersarefuckinweird.pdf -- (( a 2-page document, where the first is a classy menu for baked goods with a catering section at the bottom, and the second is a matching menu for healing by injury type with a 'special requests on case by case basis' section at the bottom. It lists reviving as a special request. )) FO: i think she bases it partly on what a dude can scrape together, but idk FO: theres a chance sparks might be willin to help (or meddle) for free, but hes got an M!A rn thats fuckin up his ability to do things Saness (sanesspsuede) - Today at 1:17 PM [ sanessPsuede downloaded meenahsfliersarefuckinweird.pdf ] SP: Oh hey, great, thanks. SP: I don't know how close she is to starting one, because she's not answering any of my messages. SP: I'll probably have to hunt her down in person. I figure she can't start a game if I get her out of the zone for a bit. SP: Maybe delay the inevitable. SP: Fex is a cool dude. You and he have some stuff in common there. SP: I haven't been able to tell my friend not to yet, obviously. I don't think she took it seriously when I told her about it before. flippinOptimist[WIR] - Today at 1:23 PM FO: good luck delayin it, an talkin your friend outta it FO: sgrub is somethin you can make the best outta, f you get stuck in it, but uh FO: a lot of it sucks real bad Saness (sanesspsuede) - Today at 1:27 PM SP: It's probably more efficient SP: to see if dying works SP: rather than engaging in a risky conflict unprepared SP: Side note! SP: Thoughts on how to break a mental connection to a thing that is not a person? SP: Like the Anista puppet or a wall. SP: If there's not a mind, can there even be a link? flippinOptimist[WIR] - Today at 1:41 PM FO: efficient isnt really a good word when somebodys life is on the line, and id still risk it. its more about whats most likely to work i think. FO: i think worrying about whether or not something is a person is more of a soul / heart thing FO: if it has a mind, thats close enough FO: theres plenty of bugs that are too simple for me to be able to get a read on FO: and a couple a computer programs that are almost something enough, that i cant quite reach FO: but i peeked at her and saw that she existed and that there was stuff, if i was careful enough i might be able to unplug somethin FO: i think info processing and the ability to choose between outcomes is the big thing. ideally in some kind of.. complex..ish way, naut just a simple if statement Saness (sanesspsuede) - Today at 2:07 PM SP: What about a literal wall? Something completely mindless. Could something eldritch-y make a connection to it? flippinOptimist[WIR] - Today at 2:11 PM FO: never seen one! one way to find out though B) Saness (sanesspsuede) - Today at 2:22 PM SP: :D SP: Okay, I'm gonna see about getting in touch with Meenah. No point waiting around. SP: It's efficient, and probably more effective. SP: I'm not inclined to gamble with more than my own neck if I can avoid it. SP: Risk to result ratio says dying is the way to live SP: while causing the least amount of harm, probably flippinOptimist[WIR] - Today at 2:25 PM FO: if youre sure dude FO: for what its worth, if you go into a death knowin its comin and bein okay w knowin youre (probably) comin out the other side, its naut as aaaaaaaaAAAAa as it is when its a surprise and also a big upsetting disruption FO: its still kinda A Fuckin Thing, but FO: its possible to get over it, more n most ways of death comin by Saness (sanesspsuede) - Today at 2:29 PM SP: Okay, I'm not really sure, but the alternative worries me a lot and putting other people at risk jangles my moral compass pretty hard flippinOptimist[WIR] - Today at 2:30 PM FO: man, if you ever godtier, you're definitely gonna run into problems w the heroic thing Saness (sanesspsuede) - Today at 2:35 PM SP: Just means I'd be a normal dude with super powers. One life, one death. Seems fair. SP: And sucky. SP: No thank you, Sgrub. flippinOptimist[WIR] - Today at 2:43 PM FO: yeah, p much.

#ooc eyes only #flippinoptimist #plot #//death #//suicide #//mind control #//manipulation #//amnesia #//head stuff #chat log #long post

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