tavvy crocker will be mentored by hell tier vriska who is going to be a guardian to all the omega kids and therefore in sburb with them vriska is going to die similar to how mom lalonde and bro died and tavvy will go grim dark about it
The fact that the "session" Vriska has begun is no S***b at all but a therapy session in the hyperbolic helltier chamber.
Hilarious.
It's cool how the page is basically Homestuck: The Visual Novel.
The talksprites & dialogue do the heavy lifting, the background & music's there for the ambiance.
Upon seeing the time skip, Blaperile had the good idea that she might be in here for 6 to 8 years.
Bringing Vriska closer in age to the other Meat timeline kids.
At least, near the start of their journey to Deltritus. Plus, most of them are functionally immortal.
In a lot of ways, Vriska was left lagging behind.
Her insistence on going out to fight Lord English meant that her own personal timeline has been so short until now compared to the rest.
Terezi went out to search for her for years upon years, while for her, less than a week passed on Candy Earth? Crazy.
I was wondering what introspection could be forced upon Vriska, that would feel earned.
I mean, the post-retcon version of her already did much of this on and off screen, it could've ended up feeling repetitive somehow.
But no.
No, this feels right so far.
She spends the first two years (???) trying and failing to move forward with Tavros (and Davepeta).
I would've assumed she only had those two locations to explore in all that time (Tavros' hive's terrain and her own).
Until she started venting there.
Seems everything in Helltier Alternia is available to her.
It probably just never stops feeling fake.
Which reminds me a lot of the (revised) ending to qntm's Ra.
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In which the characters end up on a simulated version of Earth with the story's self-proclaimed protagonist swearing up and down she can feel the difference.
And nothing what the people in here do matters as none of it's real.
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So, what are the people in the hyberbolic chamber, truly?
Tavros & Aradiabot seem like self-aware versions of their past selves, like unawakend dream selves.
Tavros even felt more confident than I've remembered him ever seeing.
Hope this isn't because this was his pre-paralysis self.
I kind of wonder if the sprites are standing in for themselves in the chamber.
Aka that Vriska hung out with GCATavrosprite-as-his-past-self all this time?
Not sure though.
Aradiabot, you ask? Well we know that Alpha Aradia has been travelling to all sorts of alternate timelines and is very much much older than she looks.
So she could've gone and filled in for Aradiabot here, too. She used to be her own sprite, after all!
But that doesn't feel entirely satisfactory, either.
It kind of feels nicer to imagine Vriska's been engaging with "meta Tavros" and "meta Aradia".
Aka, an amalgam of who've they've been in the story, to the people reading Homestuck.
Very much a function of the Point, but also very much the character themselves as well.
In other news, how many times will Vriska end up 'dying' in the chamber, on screen?
I mean, in the last part she went to lie on her quest bed. Not a lot of sleep happens on those! At least, not for long.
It's hilarious that Davepeta seems to have been designated Vriska's "handler" but has no real experience to help her along.
I mean, that's most of the sprites in a nutshell, but still.
If the chamber's supposed to give her growth, you'd have thought she'd be given a better helper.
Then again, the sprites might be constructs of the chamber too.
Vriska might really be in here alone and the chamber just has her own psyche to work with.
She's internalized she's a badass who doesn't need help.
And now she's slowly unlearning things.
By now, she's learned to ask other people what they want to do.
The prompt "What will you do?" was never about her, it was about the others.
It's going to be interesting to see what she has to confront in the Mindfang path, though.
It would be wild to get talksprites for Mindfang or Spidermomsprite!
But if it's about her toxically near-religious obediance to Alternia's obsession with ancestors…
Yeah I can see her talking with a version of pre-retcon Vriska. Or Aranea.
We don't know if she ever did meet a version of her dancestor post-retcon.
Loved how the page went and took in a larger part of the page, like during [S] Cascade.
And the branching paths evoke the paths we got to choose from during the time the cartridge was corrupted.
Yeah, on rereading the text, I think Tavros & Aradiabot are elements of the chamber trying to guide Vriska along.
If she'd only contemplated what WORDS could've been better than the ones she said already, instead of jumping to ACTIONS (hers or Tavros'), it wouldn't have taken two years for her to get there with Tavros.
But that's the road she had to travel:
Apologies -> Revenge -> Actually sitting down & sorting it out with the other party.
Now for her to unlearn all her other unhealthy coping strategies!
Yeah she's going to be here for a while.
Neat bit, that bit about projecting though.
It's true, underneath all the bluster, she was just a kid trying to find the best way to deal with the world she was given.
And then, when she thought she found it, she put everyone in the same box with her.
And hey, Tavros' reaction (pointing) at realizing she might be projecting… Was that a reference to the Turnabout fangame?
Him proposing they could be projects for one another… Imagine them as moirails, dear god.
Tavros can very much pretend to be blue as he is now (as a sprite).
It's interesting to (re)learn how much Vriska was obsessed with trying to patch things up with Aradia.
While Aradia was like "whatever, bye", lol.
And, is the helltier rung thing a real thing?
Cause we saw godtiers physically represented as platforms!
This seems more like Vriska's finally truly scaling her echeladder.
Like she skipped a few steps in growing as a S***b player, which seems just so like her.
Real on the nose that she spends all this years. Stuck. In her old home.
Bent. To return to her hive each time.
Aradiabot's spiel about incremental change & the danger of cycles reminds me of the song.
"I'm going around, not in circles but in spirographs."
It's the difference between getting stuck in this chamber vs. the dreambubbles, too, I guess.
Waiting to see if this all really will end up with a Scourge Sister fond reunion!
