#laurasaurasreads

[laurasauras-reads]

on alternia!

dammek’s basement is pretty sparse so it was very quick to get through and didn’t provoke any particular reactions. except that omg xefros is way more subservient than i remember. 

i am SO tempted to choose this option but i am physically incapable of being rude like this, i just can’t.

i love xefros’s room, also xefros himself. no intro panel for him like we got for joey (we didn’t get one for jude either), but he’s clearly into stickball and rapping, as well as his more involuntary interests like butlering. 

this is too cute i just can’t!!!

i have no idea why this is so funny to me

i love sloth lusus

oh, this is totally the globe that she didn’t recognise. grandpa has a globe of alternia! that’s cool!

scurrying around dammek’s house is only illuminating things we already know about alternia and showing the cultural differences between joey and xefros. it’s cute and i like it, but it’s not giving me much to ponder. i really do wonder what it would be like to play this as a complete newbie to homestuck and related properties. 

yeah, now you mention it, the nitrams are pretty leadership-y. 

awwww

okay their meeting is adorable. i have friends who ship them and i think because i sped through the game so fast last time i didn’t quite get it. and i really hope that xefros gets some more assertiveness in act 2 because i don’t gel with his vibes, but i can totally see it. 

[laurasauras-reads]

oh my god how did i forget that jude knows exactly what the portal does?! and the key was a. claire’s heirloom, is this what happened to their mum?? or even, is it what happened to jake? i know that he’s always been absent, but given how there’s no pics of the three of them together i had thought jude was too young to know their mum. there’s also the fact that joey has stashed other things in the attic, so the portal isn’t a new feature and it seems like a. claire has been gone for a while. hmmmm!

jaaaaaaaaaake nooooo! this will be your demise, buddy.

first off, stunning. love the design of this thing. there’s not a terrible amount to say because it’s really obvious that there’s two snakes with cherub swirls on them. i don’t know why that would provoke a portal to alternia?

kinda seems like hypnosis juju stuff.

and now we have officially swapped hives!

[laurasauras-reads]

oh no! the face of a boy who just lost his favourite pigeon. i couldn’t get his actual reaction face because it was too quick, but that was Very Horrified. god, he looks so sad :(

the face of a boy whose pigeon is NOT behaving!

finally! a successful pigeon! and a dealt with monster!

i cannot find bread or bread-like things anywhere, going back to the trophy room as i didn’t really explore it properly before.

so at the bottom there’s the black and white dogs, bec noir and PM, and the snake has lord english vibes. in the middle we have a smuppet and a scalemate thing, and is that a dave representation with the sword and the white hair and the red eyes? there’s possibly more going on here, don’t know.

eyyyy

okay i legit can’t find bread. going to have to look at a walkthrough!

omg. like sburb!

aaaaaaaaaa it’s so obvious i feel silly!

okay, key gained, monsters avoided, into the attic!

[laurasauras-reads]

firstly, jake’s thing for blue ladies is hilarious to me. blue lady is actually a slang term for heroin, but i don’t think that’s relevant. i honestly have no idea what this is a reference to, if anyone knows please comment! also i love joey’s reaction to the lamp. fair, honestly.

the kitchen and basement are mostly full of the same “my guardians are inadequate” prompts, which is fair given the circumstances. the basement also had a monster to defeat after switching the breaker to get the power up again. i honestly got too caught up to remember to screenshot!

back in the trophy room and one more monster encounter later, jude remembers that he’s made the puzzle for the attic key unsolvable because he has the necessary marbles. 

why is jude so gung ho about keeping the attic locked? is it because of the portal? maybe he doesn’t know the exact details but jake asked him to keep it secure, that’s definitely something a younger and less jaded kid would take seriously. or he could just like making things impossible to access!

whatever the situation, i love him. SO cute! and on the matter of his being young enough to still look up to his absent pa, he has a not dissimilar speech pattern to jake. 

and immediately after i say that he might not know the exact details we find this. i have played this before, it was just when it came out so a while ago. 

oh homestuck, never change.

[laurasauras-reads]

good god this is disturbing. 

get it? he’s a troll! this is a great reference, i love it, especially jude taking the place of the expatri8

you know this actually reminds me of oxfordRoulette’s depiction of the lord and lady of death from her fic Vanitas vanitatum.

definitely didn’t find this thing on my first playthrough. love the reference to bec and the plausible explanation of their own white dog. there’s other combos too, including the cherub candy swirl. 

“my biggest fan”! of course jake harley can seduce whoever he wants, and it seems that his thing for the movies is a universal constant too. tbh i think that most of the attributes we see in the characters in homestuck are pretty constant.

i’d say this means that a. claire died in childbirth? but honestly i don’t know if that lines up, given the other picture of her and joey. people generally take pictures with their kids while they’re still in hospital though. i should probably mention at this point that i haven’t read the skaianet archive thing and i have no idea if i will or not. seems like if the gang wanted us to, it’d still be available. 

oh jake . . . he clearly married a. claire from a picture on the wall, so you’d think he was okay with the family life. there’s the possibility that joey reminds him too much of a. but i think it’s more likely that responsibility terrifies him and so he delegated it to a. and then roxy (and then bec). 

it’s interesting that joey comments on him having used to be good with animals, basing it off a picture of him with halley that looks really similar to the composition of her and her dog. obviously the hunting thing has made her think that he no longer cares about animals, but it’s not necessarily that clear cut. he could be compartmentalising, that seems jakeish. 

[laurasauras-reads]

details i’m noticing in joey’s room:

that looks an awful lot like jade, but she won’t be born for another year. alpha jade founded skaianet and it’s very likely that beta jake did too. even if nothing else, it’s a company that pops up. 11/11 is a pretty significant homestuck day too. the day the alphas play sburb and calliope and caliborn’s birthday. 

baking is significant! as is the fact that joey either can’t ask roxy to buy her supplies or it hasn’t even occurred to her that she can. pretty sad either way.

manthro chaps are honestly so disconcerting. 

who can’t appreciate a gatsby reference? longing for a perfect life that is unattainable works for this situation, but i think it’s simpler than that. there was an opportunity to make a reference and they took it. 

oh my god, so much to dig into here. hot steppin seems to be a dirty dancing parody; same kind of font, she’s looking like baby, totally a movie joey would be into. same with star avenue. the story keeps happening is a neverending story thing, which featured in homestuck and the phrasing of that title also calls back to SBaHJ. i don’t know what to do with canadian campfire spook-ems, but maybe it’s the monster link. acorn’s shadow is a chapter from detective pony. second mom is . . . yikes. girl’s got some mommy issues.

doesn’t it just?

aaaaa poor joey. the drunk roxy thing, pa being absent for weeks and when he was there basically treating the house as a storage locker. the drawings make it sadder somehow.

omg i’m an idiot, i got literally everything i think i can in joey’s room and then i turned the light on. this is a very typical play style for me.

[laurasauras-reads]

oh my god, i forgot what a stunning game this is! and the backgrounds never stop being beautiful, with the characters keeping that style that homestuck gradually developed and that homestuck^2 has maintained. the movements of the characters are so fluid, they’re kind of transfixing to watch, which is very suitable for a story where joey’s dancing plays such a large role.

and the opening is SO wholesome! i love their dog so much and you can already tell a lot about the characters from this brief establishing scene.

again, beautiful game. the whole house has this really cluttered feel, like it really is run by two kids and a roxy. there’s obvious grandpa elements in the main house (and he’s definitely one for clutter himself) but even they have stickers and other decorations on them. 

it could be because of my own background or the fact that i know going into this that grandpa isn’t really around, but i have a tendency to see such an excess of Stuff as a compensation. like “maybe if i give my kids everything they could want then they’ll forgive me for being absent or i’ll be able to ease my conscience in that regard”. 

joey’s intro is classic homestuck. i assume joey is short for josephine, which is a pretty old fashioned name, but one i really like (probably because it crops up in my family). combined with claire it gives me a classic hollywood feel.

“in no particular order” could be played straight, but i don’t think it is. she’s a puzzle-solver first, which is handy for this style of game. she’s a semi-orphan second, and the lack of parents is a recurring theme in homestuck so joey’s preoccupation with the loss of her idealised mother is right on track for that, as is grandpa’s absence (and yet strong presence through all the Stuff) and roxy’s as well. it sounds like she tries her best, but she’s young and i remember on my first play through that it felt like she was developing habits that would stay with her with rose.

she’s a dancer, which of course is a major part of gameplay, so it makes sense that that comes next. aspiring vet is another one that’s useful for an adventure game, but it also strikes me as very cute; it’s the kind of job a girl who loves animals wants. and she’s a big sister. it’s also cute that that makes the list and i don’t think it being last diminishes that.