Homestuck Act 8

Blog for the undiscontinued 'Homestuck' continuation adventure, Act 8.

[act8official]

Not asking for spoilers or anything, but I just discovered act 8 and I wanted to ask: Do you plan on tying it on the homestuck epilogues in the ending or is it gonna go in a completly different direction? Just so I know if I should wait to start the epilogues or not c:

Nope, not necessary to read the epilogues before act 8. The story was planned long before the epilogues dropped, so if I tried to change things too much halfway through, I feel like it would be too obvious & distracting. It'd be better (for me) to save any response to the epilogues/post-canon for a different fan adventure.

Some thematic things may appear relevant, though, by virtue of them both being responsive to the same source material. Thank you for the ask!

[act8official]

Is Resolve the end of Act 8?

Nope, there's 444 pages left. "Resolve" has the dual meaning of both reconciliation and resolution, one side looking back to get things in order, and one looking forward with a sense of commitment, purpose and finality. That's the idea anyway.

[act8official]

I'm not sure if someone's already given the heads up, but Damara's text on page 142 is broken, probably after some site update

Yeah-- that happened after an MSPFA update while I was away. It’s a shame because it wasn’t just Google translate, it was properly translated by someone that volunteered to help us way back when. I’ve since lost the original translation so I’d need to seek someone out. It’s definitely on a list of things I need to do this year, thank you for the reminder.

[sketch-squid]

@act8official is great for many reasons, but mainly because it has jade harley

[act8official]

In other news...

The [s] pages that became non-responsive after the flash update (all of them, I’m pretty sure) have been replaced for now by youtube embeds. Eventually I hope to have html5 conversions, but I’m going to prioritize other things first.

not exactly sure how the old roadmap holds up after the intermission delay. I might revisit it later and give us new projections.

that’s all folks-- take care, lmk if you have any questions.

[act8official]

INTERMISSION: TURTLES

No hard feelings, kid. Eventually, everything has to end.

This is an odd one. I’m a bit nervous you won’t like it. If so, don’t worry; this will be the last and only time I do any update quite like this one. Take care, and hopefully enjoy.

[act8official]

Just wanna say that act 8 has played a huge part in me returning to homestuck. The art is incredible and the effort put into the writing makes it feel so faithful to the original. I wish I could write out how much I appreciate your dedication to this project so I hope this anon will suffice. Have a good rest of your day ! ☺️

That’s amazingly kind for you to say and I appreciate it hugely, thank you for taking the time to say so. I want to give back to the experience homestuck was in the best way I can. You have a great day too!

[act8official]

Congrats on finishing [S] Resolve, that must've been a Herculean task! I'm holding off until the adventure gets there but I've been here since the beginning and I cannot in words describe how excited I am to know you've finished it!

Thanks! That’s definitely how it felt. Can’t wait to finally have it & the adventure pages up. It’s been a long journey to get to this point.

[act8official]

excited for the upcoming update! do you have an idea of whether it’ll be released today or on tuesday yet?

Hi there-- hoped for Tuesday, but my arms have a time limit on them with some pain issues I experience now and then. Sorry for the letdown. I’m pretty close to getting it live and took time off from work this week for my birthday, so hopefully it won’t take much longer.

[act8official]

Slight change of plans

Intermission likely won’t be done on Thursday, so let’s figure 4/10 or 4/13 instead. I needed a bit more downtime after the flash than I thought, and there’s more I’d like to clean up in general before updating the comic. Thanks for understanding!

[act8official]

is there a place other than mspfa ur posting the comic? it says it hasnt been updated since last may but there seems to be more story!

Nope-- see this post for more info.

[act8official]

Out of curiosity, why'd you wind up going with Calliope+optional Seppucrow instead of Muse Calmasis's older design concept? Just simplicity?

The design I used in the flash was always what I was going to do, but there was some miscommunication in our skype chat at the time which lead to Calicorn finishing the other design. I’m not sure if Austin clarified that when he posted it way back when. But it is nice art!

Also! It's almost certainly way too late to even consider changing something like this, and it really doesn't matter much regardless, but IMO "Muse Mayonaka" is just about the optimal name for an Anti-Lord-English, in terms of both meaning (fan self-insert Professor Mayonaka, the song Midnight Calliope, Japanese (Damara!) vs English...) and alliterative catchiness into the bargain, even if Muse Calmasis was the most common one when the idea was making its rounds in the theorysphere.

She doesn’t have an official name in the story, (other than ‘Calliope,’ of course) so you’re totally welcome to refer to her as you’d like. Though for fun and thematic reasons I tend to call her “Miss America.”

[act8official]

Hello, i don't know if this has been asked before but, do you have a patron or something similar to mantain Act 8? or would you have problems with copyright?

The limits of viz’s publishing rights aren’t super clear to me, so I would rather not crowdfund act 8-- at least not unless I was 100% sure it would be fine. But it’s okay. I have a full time job that supports me, and I’m pretty happy doing this as a volunteer.

[act8official]

if youre alright to disclose it, how far are you planning on going with this? do you only wish to continue a little past [S] resolve or are you going all the way to exploring earth c? just curious, fanadventures like this always have my interest and i dont expect a hyper detailed answer, if any, as i understand if it could involve spoilers !!

No worries. Very light spoilers; after the intermission, we’ll be halfway through act 8′s total pagecount. I plan for it all to be basically concerned with the main problem introduced in the first half of the story, which is the alpha timeline itself. Hope that helps!

[act8official]

beautiful animation, but what was behind the decision to give races to these previously raceless characters? i found the allowance of self-insert and/or creativity in homestuck to be one of its greatest strengths

Long ago Whatpumpkin stated it would include more diversity in its merchandise and extratextual properties, but never delivered (until recently.) I basically include depictions of non-white features and characters as a way of giving people what they were promised, because that seems fair. 

I don’t believe doing this somehow subtracts those allowances, but there’s also the question of how advantageous they actually are. Araciality is not as uncomplicated as we would like, maybe. Homestuck is not racially neutral in its text or subtext, and in truth it would take more than just drawing these characters in a different way to address that. It’s something I’m keeping in mind going forward.

[act8official]

Act 8 roadmap 2021

The keen-eyed among you may have noticed the MSPFA hasn’t actually updated yet. This is because before [S] Resolve comes the intermission, which isn’t complete. Here is my plan for how the rest of 2021 is going for the project;

Intermission on 4/1/21

‘Duneswept’ on 5/8/21

Normal updates resume & continue 6/12/21 onward.

If you’ve been following the Youtube (where you can watch the completed [S] Resolve) you may have noticed we do semi-regular Sunday work streams. We’ll have a post-mortem/Q&A stream Sunday 3/21 at 10am PST, then break from those until regular posting resumes. I’ll let you know if that plan changes.

Take care!

[act8official]

Hello, I just discovered this project yesterday, and oh my gog am I enjoying it. I just reached the part where Rose tells Dave she's finally going to play the rain, and as much as it made sense in the comic for her to totally skip all her quests, it makes me really happy to see her return to them. They get to play a game, in a simpler way. And all the dialogue feels so true to the characters. Thank you for making this!

Thank you for checking it out! I’m glad you’re liking it and I hope to have more stuff out this year after a short break-- Resolve was a big effort. I’ll post more about the posting schedule for the year later today. Happy Friday all!