The Black Eyed Peas' Boom Boom Pow, Lady Gaga's Poker Face and Flo Rida's Right Round are on top of the charts. Hannah Montana: The Movie is selling out at the box office. Smartphones are just becoming popular. Tumblr is two years old.
Andrew Hussie has just posted the first sixteen pages of the new webcomic Homestuck.
I have just turned on New Reader Mode in the Unofficial Homestuck Collection, and as far as I'm concerned, the rest of the comic does not yet exist. Over the next seven years I'll be re-reading it as though it were being released live, and posting about the experience.
JOIN IN. Watch this story unfold. Follow this blog, and download the Collection at http://clown.church. Buy yourself a box of Gushers. Watch Con Air. Warn your bros about stairs. With YOUR HELP, we can return to our roots and make this the homestuck website all over again.
Gabriel Pope on SomethingAwful put into words many, many reasons why I love Vriska as a character, and touched on John development while they were at it. The original post is linked, both in the source and right here, and reproduced here in its entirety.
Gabriel Pope posted:
Character analysis! Neither John nor Dave nor Vriska have done a lot of growing at all so far. Dave and Vriska have at least reached a point where they have fessed up to their flaws and sort of took a stab at confronting them, but haven’t really gotten anywhere much.
John… doesn’t really have any character flaws to round him out in the first place except maybe for general naivete, and hasn’t had any opportunity to develop as a character because every time he runs into an obstacle that might challenge him or prompt him to grow someone holds his hand through it or beats it for him.
The most explicit and iconic example of his pattern of non-growth was Dad’s safe, which Dad set up as a test for John that Rose subsequently spoiled. You can argue that he’s developed some personal strengths, such as his leaderfriendship ability and the windy thing, but these things are depicted as being effortless and natural for him. Bec Noir’s 4x murder combo atop the castle represents the very first time in the entire comic that things did not just magically go John’s way. Will we finally see some real character advancement as a result? Possibly! We will have to see. John is cocky young Peter Parker, having just discovered he has been given great powers; now he’s watching Uncle Ben bleed out before his eyes and is about to discover that with them comes great responsibility.
On the subject of spiders, Vriska’s character arc is primarily about being a slave to destiny, whether actual or perceived. Her aspect is Light, which in the story’s internal symbolism is explicitly the representation of fate, and this pervades every aspect of her character. She’s always been preoccupied with what she’s “supposed” to do. As a child she was saddled with a particularly difficult lusus that placed great demands on her, demands that she was ill-equipped to fulfill. But then she discovered Mindfang’s journal, with tools and step-by-step instructions on how to be the coolest troll ever. She became obsessed with following in her ancestor’s footsteps, hoping to win her friends’ admiration by proving her worth as the trolliest troll, but she only ever managed to alienate and/or kill them and never understood why. It wasn’t until she killed Tavros that she realized she didn’t actually want the destiny she thought she had inherited from Mindfang.
Vriska’s struggle against destiny has manifested in other ways, as well. She was an instrumental part of Doc Scratch’s machinations, and Scratch gloated about how easy she was to manipulate. Once the trolls finished their session and were outside Scratch’s immediate grasp, she saw Bec Noir, and her first impulse upon getting a glimpse of what the future had in store was to go back and deliberately set about creating that future in the first place. She voluntarily locks herself into a self-fulfilling time loop because she sees that it is what she is supposed to do. Throughout all of this Vriska is acutely conscious that she is being steered by outside influences, almost exaggeratedly so. She desperately craves some measure of control over her life, but when things go wrong (as they frequently do) she steadfastly refuses to admit personal responsibility; she takes credit for her successes, whether or not she had anything to do with them, and attributes her failures to events outside her control.
Vriska does manage to get some control back–she picks up some of Doc Scratch’s methods and tries to play puppetmaster herself, and after she enters the game she successfully resists the exiled Black Queen’s commands. But things come to a head when Vriska hits the god tier, half by accident, and receives her powers as the Thief of Light. Now she has absolute command over luck and can literally manipulate fate itself. She’s suddenly got everything she ever thought she wanted, and her hard-won discipline dissolves–but as she is slowly coming to learn, luck doesn’t matter. Vriska sought out Noir because it was what she assumed she was supposed to do; both her ego and her sense of justice demanded it. But even when she has enough luck to survive, possibly even win, she can’t force her desired destiny to be relevant.
Now, a lot of this has only really been revealed pretty recently. It’s not like any of this was on the table when Vriska was first introduced, so it’s quite understandable that your first impression wouldn’t take any of this into account. But even quite early on Vriska was still a fascinating character–even before we really knew what all was happening with her, it was still clear that there was something going on with her. From the beginning there were cracks in her facade; if nothing else, the fact that she lies relatively often (and is pretty transparent about it) has always made her pesterlogs very rewarding, since more than most other characters they have multiple layers. In particular it is intriguing to observe how much she lies to herself (her desperate attempts to win Aradia’s forgiveness are especially illuminating.) She’s persistently displayed the same sense of self-delusion that has always made Dave so interesting, especially in his more recent appearances. She’s finally opened up a bit, but has yet to figure out a way to actually fix things. She may not ever figure it out–that may very well be John’s job, now.
I finally got around to watching Hook (1991) last weekend and honestly if Hussie was watching this in theaters at the age of 12 it makes a lot of sense to me that this would be a Formative Movie that went on to have a big impact on their work. this whole movie is about using the familiar children’s story as a backdrop to explore themes of staging and performance, and blending different mediums, because even though it’s a movie it’s engaging a lot more with theater and pantomime than with movies themselves. there are scenes that do this very explicitly, like the opening scene where the protagonist’s daughter is acting in a school production of Peter Pan, but the more interesting scenes are where it weaves the performance into otherwise ‘genuine’ scenes – Tinkerbell forcing Peter to do the ‘clap your hands if you believe in fairies’ while very obviously playing dead, Hook’s boat functioning like a stage complete with cues for the carpet which his stagehand misses and needs to be double-prompted for, and Hook and his men setting up a mock baseball game to prove to Peter’s son that he can really succeed. all that is super relevant to what I’m going to write about for the end of act 5, so I might have a good excuse to talk more about this movie there
Hook cares a lot about the importance of imagination, the idea of passing back and forth between ‘normal’ and fantasy worlds and the way those worlds impact people, and spends a lot of time considering the relationships and often conflicts between adults and children. it’s ultimately pretty conservative in that it comes down firmly in favor of the nuclear family and promotes children forgiving their parents no matter what, and I definitely wonder how Homestuck is ultimately going to fall regarding that – I'm hoping it will have a more interesting perspective but without knowing the ending it’s really too soon to say. anyway I enjoyed Hook a fair bit despite that conservatism; I’ve never had strong feelings either way about Peter Pan so with that in mind it was a pleasant surprise and I can definitely see myself watching it again for some more in depth thoughts! rufios’s definitely cool enough to give a guy more self esteem. 8/10
ok, first up, even though it came out a little while after these updates. Mobius Trip and Hadron Kaleido FUCKS HARD; Bowman absolutely knocked it out of the park with this one. It sounds like a session musician who worked with some big psychedelic rock artists in the 1960s released this as his one and only solo album in 1972, it got near-zero publicity at the time, but now there’s a cult community of online music reviewers with names like George Starostin and John McFerrin who write long thinkpieces about it and all call it the best album you’ve never heard. Genuinely does not sound like it was released in 2011, the retro sound is unbelievably well captured not as nostalgia but just as something that could legitimately be from a much earlier time. I love Bowman’s vocals, they have this exaggerated and almost alien edge to them that fits the music perfectly. I don’t know if that’s a production effect or if he can just sing like that, but it fucking rules. And I cried a little bit when he dropped ‘the note desolation plays’ in the lyrics. sweet act 1 callback! PLEASE listen to this album if you haven’t heard it, it’s an absolute gem among the already high quality HS releases.
Onto these pages!! Doc Scratch is still narrating, and he talks us through Vriska and Terezi’s brief almost-strife as she heads off to fight Jack Noir, before moving on to ‘the other Hero of Light’ (p.3777), who coincidentally is also engaged in a duel with Jack Noir. One thing I’ll say about Scratch: he has a great sense of aesthetics, cause there is a lot of cool art in this section. The two panels at the top especially are some of my favorite pieces of art that have EVER been in this comic. Though in fairness, Rose has always had the coolest strife art – pages 1583-7 and 1815-6 have always been among my favorite panels too. So maybe I won’t give Scratch all the credit. 8^y
As for Vriska and Terezi, I do view their sequence as a strife (grief), it’s just a battle that takes place in their heads. And, not unlike the kids’ strifes with their guardians, it’s all based on how well they know each other, tailoring their moves to the specific person they’re fighting instead of just using pure might. Scratch saying ‘psychology was in play’ (p.3773) is not inaccurate but it doesn’t quite capture the specificity of it, how it’s tied to their personal history and not just a general understanding of how people’s minds might work.
But on the next page, Scratch describes them as ‘just another pair of cheaters attempting to play with their cards face up’ (p.3774), and that’s…. an interesting insight into his worldview. Scratch has previously outright told Vriska that he ‘play[s] with [his] cards face up’ (p.2244) while telling her he knows she’ll eventually kill Aradia. He also tells her ‘it was [her] unpleasant, simplistic temperament that made [her] so easy to control. Vicious and predictable, like an insect’ (p.2202). So what he’s basically saying here is that be doesn’t respect Terezi and Vriska because they’re not as good at playing this way as he is? Even though that’s absolutely false, because first, Vriska is ultimately successful in playing Terezi this way, and second, it’s way more impressive that they can do this without omniscience. Scratch’s compulsive need to express superiority over people with radically less power and knowledge than he is gets more pathetic each time he does it, and it’s like, painfully obvious that he’s never had a relationship of equals like Terezi and Vriska’s where he can use these techniques in a way where losing is an option or when his personal feelings affect his ability to manipulate.
I’m a big fan of how death and killing is the major throughline of Vriska and Terezi’s relationship. In many ways the trolls feel very human – they think like humans and they have a relationship that humans could realistically have, even if they have specific terminology that we don’t. But the big specter haunting their relationship is the literal thousands of deaths that they caused together, and the biggest thing that affects their continuing relationship is the deaths Vriska may have caused recently and the question of it either one of them can or will kill again. You can come up with human equivalents for that – for example, a relationship between two former bullies who are both trying to change in different ways – but it’s not a fully satisfying comparison to me. The specifics of what they’ve done is what makes them feel alien so me, since they’re so different to anything any of the human kids (or the majority of actual humans) have done.
In the end, Terezi does not kill Vriska. (thank fuck for that! I want to see them interact forever) There’s a few possible reasons for this, one being that my understanding of kismesissitude is that the couple don’t kill each other because they enjoy the hatred and the challenge and want their relationship to continue. But, maybe more significantly, Terezi has expressed – less than seventy pages ago, but weirdly like five weeks earlier in serial release – that she’s not sure she’s able to kill Vriska (p.3712). There, she discusses the difference between indirectly luring someone to their death vs personally carrying out the killing act. That’s a fair distinction, but I think there’s another factor. I don’t think Terezi has ever killed another troll without Vriska’s help. I think that despite all Terezi’s strength in her own convictions in theory, her commitment to justice and her belief that she can objectively determine it, she’s not actually comfortable delivering that justice without someone she trusts backing her up and confirming that she’s making the right decision. And that’s good! It feels realistic, and it makes me like her more to know she has those doubts. So Vriska obviously doesn’t want her to kill Vriska, Dave isn’t convinced she should kill Vriska and says ‘you just do what you think you have to do’ (p.3713), and Terezi hasn’t really discussed this with anyone else. She doesn’t have that backup, so she can’t do it.
I considered the idea that Vriska has all the luck, and that this luck-stealing extends to changing people’s minds, or at least swaying them slightly when they’re on the fence. But honestly I don’t believe people’s decisions are ever based on luck, so unless the story explicitly says it is, I’d consider changing minds to be well outside Vriska’s domain and more in Terezi’s or Nepeta’s. However, since to Vriska the lucky outcome is the one where she remains part of the narrative and retains agency and significance, staying alive in a broad sense could be part of her luck. It really depends on whether Vriska’s luck is limited to specific, individual actions like a roll of the dice, or whether she can also steal luck in a larger scale, more abstract way.
This zoom in on broken Skaia is very cool! It is EXTREMELY badass to fight on a floating platform, and it’s something I exclusively associate with video games. According to Hussie, Rose and Jack’s Round 2 was originally supposed to be a complex, involved Flash to kick off Disc 2 with a bang and show the upgrade in quality between an early Disc 1 strife (for example, p.90) and now. They described the potential Flash as having ‘more frames-intensive visuals like a typical 2D fighter’ (Formspring, 19 May 2011), but said it was eventually scrapped due to time constraints and being way too ambitious a project. I think it’s a shame for the art team, who put in some hard work on the 2D sprites, and maybe there should have been a little more foresight on Hussie’s part that it wouldn’t be workable – they compare this incident to when they scrapped plans for an extra part of Dave’s Act 3 strife involving a hashrap sylladex battle, but that’s a little different because Hussie was still working alone back then and other people’s work wasn’t affected. Furthermore, it’s interesting to me that Hussie suddenly wants to make a 2D fighting game flash shortly after the Homestuck fighting game fan project was announced. Seems like some more uncredited inspiration might be happening.
I will say, I REALLY want to know what song the potential Flash would’ve been set to. It’s probably either the full version of At the Price of Oblivion, or Dance of Thorns from Tensei’s Strife! album. That’s the one question I’d ask Hussie if I could.
It IS important to me that Rose is holding out against Jack better than anyone else has since Jack received the fourth prototyping – in particular, more than any of the guardians. Insanely impressive display of skill on her part! Earlier in the story, the main conflict of Sburb was establishes as Prospit vs Derse and Skaia vs Horrorterrors, but now, Skaia feels almost out of the picture, and First Guardians vs Horrorterrors feels like a more important and relevant conflict. Represented by Jack and Rose here, potentially by Jack being the one who ends up in the Furthest Ring massacring the horrorterrors (p.3039), and potentially by Rose heading out to destroy the Green Sun with the horrorterrors’ help. I still don’t fully understand the ins and outs of the relationships between these greater forces, and I go back and forth on whether I want to know more and have that fully cleared up in the story, or if these things are so strange and alien that it’s better to keep it vague.
And speaking of strange and alien! Scratch’s reference to the ‘canvas’ (p.3784) and to his words’ interaction with it does make him feel extremely alien, moreso than his omniscience or cueball head or duty to summon an indestructible demon. (His SBAHJ reference does this too, and it feels so wrong coming out of his not-mouth – wonder how Dave would feel about his comic being known by the creepy man in the moon). Scratch is by no means the only character to interact directly with the medium, but it seems to affect the way he thinks on a more fundamental level than, say, Vriska or Jade. It makes me wonder if the further a character deviates from some understanding of “normal” correlates with how much they can and do interact with the narrative, and if it reflect some loss of humanity. That’s really interesting to me, because I see a lot of artists equate creativity, and specifically putting what they create out into the world, with connection with others and being able to express themselves and be understood. Homestuck is potentially suggesting the opposite idea, where creating and sharing something inhibits connection and self-expression.
Scratch is getting really fucking bold with his blatant lies towards us, and he’s not even trying to hide it. His ‘So ends a tale of rivalry’ (p. 3777) is false cause I’m pretty confident that he doesn’t have knowledge of anything that happens after the, well, scratch, but I guess you can call that artistic license, like a book saying ‘the end’ even though it has a sequel. But ‘I can't speak as discreetly about such matters against this canvas’ (p.3784) three fucking pages before proving he’s capable of writing in dark green when he wants to is some bullshit, actually. I’d love to think about this exclusively from an in-story perspective but it’s hard not to compare it to Hussie’s statements outside the story just a few days later, which were a similarly brazen display of ‘I make the rules and I can do what I want’. Almost like they’re using Scratch as a testing ground for things they’re getting ready to express personally. I don’t think I’d make that assumption if I wasn’t tapped into the discourse outside the story, but also, the discourse is pretty damn loud and a significant amount of serial readers will know about it.
From what I’ve seen, reactions to the Scratch ‘intermission’ have been mixed in general. Some people are enjoying the shakeup and the experimentation, but the biggest criticism I’ve seen is that major events are happening and just being brushed over, when they should be treated with more weight and given the significance they deserve. People are comparing it to Hivebent in this way, which also rushed through major developments. And I do think that’s a fair criticism, and I get how it feels anticlimactic to have months of buildup and a page of quick resolution. But I always come back to what Hussie said way back at the end of act 3 when they released ‘[S] Enter’.
I was all set to work on this thing longer, but I just decided to draw the line somewhere and put it up. Sometimes I've got to remind myself the goal here isn't to make the best thing I possibly can. It's to make the BEST FASTEST thing I can. (Newspost, 14 January 2010)
Shortcuts, efficiency, and a breakneck pace have always been part of this thing, and they’re not going to disappear. Even though the criticisms are understandable, they are criticisms of a fundamental aspect of the story. If people don’t like this aspect, but do otherwise like Homestuck, maybe longform fanfiction would be a good option for them? Same characters and story, different writer and tone? At the same time, the high-speed writing style does hit a little different when updates are slower. Because the story moves at the same breakneck pace it always has, but our experience of it is much slower, so there’s a disconnect there that didn’t exist in Hivebent. This story and this writing style can survive a couple months of slowdown without issue, but if updates are going to be slower for the rest of its run, I think the way it’s told might need to change to match. The updates that do come out will have to really count.
hello!! so my instinctive gut reaction to eridan has always been Overwhelmingly Negative - he's currently my least favorite troll and it's not even close. like, I've met this dude in real life. I've met people whose genuinely horrible attitudes towards other people and hatred towards the world around them prevents them from making any kind of meaningful connection with others, who spend time feeling sorry for themselves and acting like they're the ones who are persecuted instead of doing a single moment of self reflection. people whose help and kindness is deeply, deeply conditional based on unspoken and unequal rules they've devised. people who view violence not only as an effective way to solve problems, but as noble, as an ideal in itself. and every time, my life has been a little bit worse just from knowing these people exist and having to interact with them.
and, he's clearly a well written character because he's able to provoke this absolute rage in me, and because he always stays believable to me and never crosses a line into becoming so overblown or exaggerated that he stops being scary. I am also not judging anyone for being an eridan fan, because I don't assume that people who like him personally act like that or support real people who do - I am sure there are plenty of valid reasons for enjoying him as a character and I won't jump to any conclusions there. but if someone wanted to go into a lab and brew up a character for me specifically to hate, it's probably eridan
THAT SAID. it is absolutely my plan in the next couple of months to write something much longer about eridan, in which I work through his entire character arc and try to give him a fair analysis. I want to go into that with a reasonably open mind, and potentially revise my current opinion on him, or at least come to a better understanding of why other people might like him (instead of my current 'they probably have good reasons, but I don't entirely know what they are' perspective). I don't like to dismiss a significant character entirely based on my gut emotional reactions, plus I've done that for most of the other trolls so far and it seems unfair to not give eridan that same treatment. so all this is a preliminary response and I will at some point have some more considered, more well reasoned thoughts to update or expand upon this.
I hope this is not an upsetting response to you at all if you are personally an eridan fan! thank you for sending the question :)
So.. the disk was scratched. We couldn’t see the outcome of the coin toss, so Doc Scratch told us the “outcome”.
Doc Scratch knows everything. Including what goes on in alternate timelines. (Or at least it would make sense if he did. He's omniscient, after all.)
So, if he knows what goes on in alternate times lines, then Hussie is just fucking with us and giving us an outcome that branched off of the Alpha timeline? The coin does provide for two other timelines.
So Doc Scratch/Hussie are just feeding us a dud timeline? And when the disc has been fixed, we’ll get the real timeline?
My best guess would be that everyone (or almost everyone) is killed except John, who then causes The Scratch to reset everything in the EoA5 flash. Preferably with http://homestuck.bandcamp.com/track/savior-of-the-dreaming-dead Savior of the Dreaming Dead playing, because it involves Savior of the Waking World and Doctor, which are two forms of John’s theme. Plus, “Savior of the Dreaming Dead” is very fitting if everyone is dead (and so exist in the dream bubbles), as John would need to reset the game, hopefully saving them.
Terezi and Dave Own - Homestuck Track Remix
Upward Movement and Terezi Owns layered over each other, which sounds predictably awesome up until the part where Terezi Owns goes insane.
In addition to the above pages, late at night on May 31, two new Homestuck albums were released!
Homestuck Vol. 7: At the Price of Oblivion, featuring the stunning title track by Malcolm Brown along with many other contributions from across the music team, and the first HS album to feature fanart (instead of previous panels from the comic) to illustrate the individual tracks
and the incredibly titled Mobius Trip and Hadron Kaleido, a solo work by Michael Guy Bowman of Sburban Jungle and How Do I Live fame, and a sweet concept album I can't wait to dig into - I'm irrationally excited about getting a Homestuck album with lyrics!
