1 -> He ▼

Everyone else is getting all Narnia’d up with crowns and kingdoms, or otherwise getting established in young adult stuff, but he’s still holding back.

Like he has antagonists still to deal with, and problems still to solve? I mean, if John was reading Homestuck, you know which quarter of the fandom he’d be in. Happy to see his friends happy of course, but still wiggling his fingers trying to work out how Caliborn actually got defeated.

There’s this post I read a while ago by @stormingtheivory​ about narrative logic and gender constructs, via weird avatars. I’m not specifically focusing on the argument they make in that post (sorry ivory, just discovered the @ function!) but the interesting thing about this to me is the way they’re drawing out arguments based on contrasting explicit “exposition” and description of the nature of the world and the implicit message given by it’s events.

The thing is, how do you say something by your work? Meta-fiction gives a good example of this, like a kind of test run for having your writing give an opinion on other events, by giving an opinion on other stories.

Suppose you have a character in your film say that superman is an awful reflection on human nature, yeah, you can do that, and it works on two levels compared to just making it up yourself; you can have it reveal the nature of a character, and rather than being some headcannon/theory/raconteur bullshit you made up to amuse yourself, it can be something that has immediate rhetorical force. To this character, it means something. There’s more to it than that, not only can you get people to sit through a monologue that if you started saying in real life, you would immediately have people skip ahead to argue with you, (and I mean, look at those youtube comments, change the form of media and those arguments can immediately start, suddenly it’s just some dude, like any other youtube commentator), but also you can have it reveal how the person who is saying it thinks, or thinks they think, which can allow people to understand what they did before or what they’ll do next, or how they’ll present themselves. It’s fun!

This can weaken, sometimes a character going off into a monologue is the authors ideas breaking through their story, smashing it’s consistency and characterisation for the sake of a point they can’t resist making, other times it’s cloaked and shaped by the characters that make it. Sometimes an argument must be spread over a number of characters in conversation, because it doesn’t make sense for one character to share it alone, which is where you start turning into Plato or Aaron Sorkin, where you have this particular set of characters together so they can collectively argue themselves towards the point you wish to make. (And if your not careful, when you get into writing it some of the characters will start going “gosh you’re right” for minutes at a time.)

But there’s a next level too, suppose you then place this argument within the world of the story, so that people arguing are not just acting as different perspectives to a dialog, there to shepherd it to your inevitable conclusion, but the argument is left unfinished, to be explored in events. Or a character makes an analogy with some other part of life, and then you explore that. Suddenly you can do things like having the events show that the words you wrote, although they sounded persuasive at the time, turned out to be false. Perhaps the Bride in Kill Bill proves that she can live as a normal person in a way that strengthens her rather than weakening her, perhaps President Bartlet realises that his disproportionate responses mean he’s now responsible for the reconstruction of another country, and has lost loads of allies.

This can bring two different messages, the most basic one being “beware of writers”, beware of good speeches and clever words, of arguments stacked with the right participants and restricted depictions of events that make the wrong thing look obviously right.

But then there’s all kinds of other messages, someone’s post-Kill Bill fan fiction can be a way of rejecting the arguments of that speech, especially if it does so in a way that reflects things from their own life, or well realised ideas about what it means to recover from terrible and destructive ways of relating to the world. And, while it’s doing all that, it can say something about Superman too, about how that character works, what it means to have a character with veiled power etc.

Or someone’s fan fiction about the war on terror being started by President Bartlet could reveal how that argument works in real life, with him stuck having to reconstruct a country, and loosing lots of allies.

Or you can also do what the west wing actually did and have another argument start later on in the same episode, and push things the other way again with more evidence, but somehow that seems less powerful, the proof of events seems more important than just what some character says.

And that, is a character arc. To me anyway. A character arc is when a character does or thinks something about themselves, and you explore the truth of that through the consequences of their actions, the events that happen to them, and the mix of circumstance, choice and destiny that you happen to think is reasonable within your genre. It’s the same deal as when you explore some argument that reaches outside of your story, except you’re dealing with identity and attitude in some broader way.

Homestuck is a world that’s full of destiny constructs, rewards and punishments. The story nearly, nearly, starts reflecting on what it means to have a destiny, what it means to have events twirl around and hit you with progress or just consequences.

There are a lot of stories out there that talk about arguments, tell you to suspect writers because they write good arguments, but this is almost a story that tells you to suspect plot, to suspect just deserts and heroism.

Compare the god tier destiny clock, Caliborn’s “mastery of the alpha” etc. is there a difference between these imposed destinies and the ones that come from character’s attitudes to themselves? What about Tavros’s dance moment?

But like I said before, just getting people to doubt the validity of arguments is only the most basic form of taking “saying something” beyond author avatars. The next level is actually saying something about how those arguments miss reality. To have one character say one thing about themselves, but then the opposite happens can be a really weak arc, in a fairly exact sense; it’s crap if you’re just saying “wow, sometimes people don’t know what they’re like at all I guess!”, just like plot can be crap if it’s just events unhinged from internal logic. It becomes more interesting the more that the reasons for their failure to understand themselves are themselves revealed, or if you say how they were actually right, but didn’t consider something else, or because life changed them in a way that people do change, and so on.

And for me this is a weakened theme because character’s don’t all maintain their voice, sometimes they go along with imposed destiny just because, or are drawn into becoming the narrator of someone else’s triumphs because someone needs to do it, but don’t necessarily show their own traits while they are doing it, like becoming the generals to their President Bartlet. Jade narrates a story, second hand, about John having another god-moment, heard through alt-Calliope. What does this story say about her understanding of destiny, or Calliope’s? How does she react to Calliope when they meet again, how does her reaction to what she is told about their common aspect reflect that? Does any of this come out when she meets someone else she is more familiar with?

Karkat finds peace with being pretty rubbish at playing the game, finding a victory at his own scale. Dave deals with serious emotional stuff, up front, John completes his destiny in the most speedrunny fashion, but maybe hasn’t actually learned very much, apart from knowing his friends better. Calliope and English descend into mythic oblivion, with Vriska, mistakenly chasing the “last boss”, and.. a lot of the other arcs are very unfinished. They’re unfinished because Dave’s tendency to blurt out massive speeches allows him to reveal the character development he’s done off screen during a massive time skip, and some of the opportunities the story has to be insightful about it’s own characters by posing situations in which they reveal character traits are skipped. And some of the endings of certain characters are distorted by the fact that they also happen similarly to other people. Karkat talks with Kanya in a cave, and it’s self-referentially him messing up a big ending talk, after he’s just watched Dave do one, but it’s also a missed opportunity in terms of interesting character-revealing writing.

Homestuck challenges the ideas of destiny and big rambling exposition speeches, and at the end falls back on them, in a way that weakens it’s ability to make a consistent statement. Take a slice of the comic, maybe Jade’s arc 4/5 arc of disillusionment and pragmatism, or Jane’s higher levels of emotional realism in terms of "How can living in this game not be goshdarn fucking you up? What kind of person do you need to be to cope with this? Maybe on drugs? Some kind of robot??" through arc 6/1-5. You can see developments of interesting themes, a character’s voice and perspective building up that the story does things with, subverting their expectations, or playing characters off each other. You can create these strips of narrative with these nice coherent themes based on how characters see themselves, or how we see characters. It doesn’t always last though, the themes fade, and the characters still exist, but without the obvious motivating forces they had before.

Like why does Jane get her villain crush on Vriska? Well she ignores what people say and makes stuff happen, and she seems sufficiently emotionally unbalanced to cope with upsets pretty well. At first glance Jane could see a lot she would like to be in her. This could have come up in how she described her, or in a later conversation with the Nanasprites. Or if there had been some point where she had properly met her most obvious contrast, John, not merely showing things about him by going through different versions of the same events, but actually interacting with him hearing about some of the things that happened to him, and talking to Roxy about it. Now that would be a conversation.

Anyway, this was supposed to be the basics, and I haven’t even properly started covering implicit parallels, alt-timelines and expys, and so I’m going to wrap this up now:

Giving all your characters arcs is unrealistic, just like characters making jokes that are always funny is unrealistic, or never having boring conversations, but you can put in just enough intentional crap to give the impression that it’s happening in the background, and edit towards the good stuff, or just try to make everything good and have characters sometimes respond as if it’s bad. So if Dave Strider’s going around saying “People don’t have arcs”, and most of the characters actually do, that’s interesting, that’s a reflection of his character and his avoidance of convention and destiny, and his occasional gaps in judging character, but if he’s saying that and, yeah, most of them don’t, then it’s like a character in a comedy show saying “people can’t be funny all the time”, you want it to be relatable, but not actually that true in the context of the events we see. Especially if you’re making this kind of exaggerated metaphysical meta-narrative stuff.

You can start with characters with ludicrous unreal traits, ridiculous quirks, but they slowly gain a nebulous kind of authenticity by going through development that treats their traits as if they were normal human weirdness, as if they were a joke, but also the developments of a concrete character that can be treated with the same care and attention, and so you end up saying all kinds of interesting things. Until you’re not.

When Jane is doing her Villain crush monologue about Vriska, she says..

Most of the first bit is just trying to muddy the waters about who she is talking about, is it Equius, Nepeta etc? But what’s the next bit about?

It’s pretty weird really, you can take it as a metaphor for a curtain calls at the end of a play or musicals, but those can be done just as well bowing in front of closed curtains as re-opening the curtains to show the whole cast bowing in a set. There’s no particular reason that them doing it on the audience side of the curtain would mean they survived, or won or whatever else.

So why would it matter that they were bowing outside of the curtains? Looks like an escape metaphor to me! Caliborn uses curtains for his “masterpiece” and his control of the narrative, the comic uses curtains for each act. So being outside of the curtains is being outside of the comic. Done.

Also reminds me of good old Seer: Descend, where Rose goes through curtains representing every act, removes the frog statue, and then teleports out.

Course, Jane’s not actually an omniscient narrator, she can’t even remember how to describe the person she’s talking about when she’s writing this, but still, seems like an escape type hint.

And because this isn’t actually Truman Show, and escaping the narrative is less about not being observed as about avoiding your obligations to fate and time loop plotting, there’s still the possibility for seeing what the characters are like post game, on the other side of the curtains, with the game rather than its players disappearing into obscurity behind the curtains.

Looking back at that, parts of what I predicted held up reasonably well: Act 5 was a split act where English was introduced as the man behind the man behind the man, and Act 6 Act 5 was a split act ending in the Lord English version of Jack being introduced as a villain.

My guess was that Act 6 Act 6 Act 5 would show English’s rise from Calliborn’s perspective, dealing in how he gets all these time loops and transfers his soul from world to world. What I didn’t guess, was that because it was being depicted by Calliborn, it wouldn’t actually be that informative in terms of the hows and why’s, even if it did give the origin of his name, component parts, and ability to travel universes.

In retrospect that makes sense, explaining complex plots never really was his thing. TAKES TOO LONG. TOO MANY WORDS etc.

Now in my enthusiasm for Act 5 symbolism, I never actually said anything about Act 6. Collide as we had it was pretty straightforward, but as an Act 6 it could have been very odd, because at first Act 6 reprises Acts 1-5, and then Act 6 Act 6 reprises Act 6 itself by offering a different take on Acts 1-5, as well as by focusing on Caliborn, a character introduced in that Act, by making him the narrator.

So what about Act 6 Act 6 Act 6? Well aside from being 666, making it the perfect time for an evil dude to appear, it’s also in the same basic situation as Act 6 Act 6, and could feasibly re-do acts 1-5 all over again, until it gets to its version of Act 6.

You can see where this is going. If the comic followed that structure perfectly, it would never end, because every act 6 would split into 6 sub-acts, and so on forever.

As amusing and problem-sleuthy as that would be, it’s also a little too ridiculous for something written by human beings. How do you fix this? And how on earth is Caliborn OK with all this sub-act stuff anyway? He hates that shit! Well, from his perspective, Act 6 Act 6 Act ... are not him following Hussie’s structure at all, but an act of unrivalled subversive genius, improving upon while satirising the original work.

(I’m aware of the irony of this given what I’m about to suggest)

It’s also more sloppy and brief, which is something that gets important when arcane story structures start to pile up like this. Interestingly though, Caliborn actually vacates the narrator seat after Act 6 Act 6 Act 5, mirroring Hussie’s death somewhere during Act 6 Act 5, and sort of mirroring Hussie’s fight with Scratch, (who was at that time the narrator) at the end of Act 5.

So yeah, every act 5 ends with someone fighting the narrator and them giving up their position.

Based on that setup, it’s reasonable to imagine that instead of jumping to Collide, Act 6 Act 6 Act 6 would instead introduce an even sloppier narrator, and embrace the idea of infinite Act regress. And from there comes my Gamzee as narrator idea, as he’s presumably available, and sloppy enough for it to work. Also a great punchline to “the most important character in homestuck” too.

Another cute idea could have been to end with something actually breaking the narrative prompt, making the “next act” link actually loop back to the start of Act 6 Act 6 Act 6, but creating formatting scripts for the site that infinitely produce extra Act 6 headers until they start to flow off the side of screen. But you could also have a little alternate link at the bottom of all the extra act pages that leads you out into the final intermission, which would start with Collide.

There’s a few obvious ways to do it, the first is that you stick ruthlessly to the “Arc 6 Arc 6 is under Calliborn’s control, main character’s do their stuff in the intermissions” structure, and just as everyone’s getting ready for collide, you chuck in Act 6 Act 6 Act 6, jumping incongruously to a much less happy timeline.

You’d need some kind of framing device for it, because Calliborn wouldn’t put up with much detailed interpersonal stuff, maybe Gamzee takes over the narrative prompt while Calliborn’s away. Something weird. Anyway, the result is vast interpersonal tragedy compressed into surprisingly few actual comic pages (although surprisingly few is probably still 200-400ish), possibly alternating character stuff with extreme drama, depending on however Gamzee would go about doing things.

Then you make collide + denouement the intermission between acts 6 and 7.

This is seriously brutal, and sacrifices all the buildup to collide, although it is extremely homestuck, unless of course you start doing an alternate buildup at the end of that act, matching the collide buildup in emotion if not in detail.

Another weird result of this would be that you’d probably end up humanising the Condesce, then jump right into fighting her to the death, while her younger self fights to kill her alt-future boss, and it would also give the expectation, at least from the name, that collide would include some things from the tragic alpha timeline, which it wouldn’t, if you’re just inserting a new arc 6.

Another idea would be to make a more extreme alteration, with duelling timelines; you’d have two timelines, but you wouldn’t tell anyone which was which, just flick between them chaotically, until sometimes people are dead, sometimes they aren’t, but the differences between the timelines become more obvious, as one drifts towards reconciliation and victory, and the other gets darker. That Terezi has sight in one timeline would make her a marker to determine which one it happens in, eventually running up to remember, where she combines experiences from all three.

Another possibility could be using the intermission/act swapping that started happening during the John/Calliborn fight, so that the tragic alpha and the truman-show alpha are marked by their respective colours, which would probably make things a lot easier to work with, and give a more obvious impression of conflicts happening on a narrative level.

Dramatically speaking, there’s still that constantly floating other shoe, in the sense that we know some version of the characters bounce to Calliborn’s session, and from there go to the void, and then the dream bubbles and apparently everything in it are destroyed by a black hole.

But that line of the story hangs there, like a second game over timeline. As this post brilliantly pointed out, the presence of this unresolved element, of never fighting the big boss but only the mini-boss, makes the ending feel extremely incomplete.

There’s one explanation I can give for it however. I suggested before that we can use the multiple timelines created by John’s jumping to account for the Calliope and Calliborn timelines operating independently.

What if we go further? Let’s call the timeline that creates Calliborn, without Aranea interfering, the “Business as Usual” timeline.

In this timeline, we have John randomly appearing, hugging everyone, getting the ring of life, then disappearing.

Then the Condesce’s plan swings into action, and she eventually leaves through the door, (starting off green this time) having stolen the earth and the matriorb. This version of the group have the same experiences as the Game Over timeline, and are outmaneuvered due to their various personal issues. What would probably be even more interesting is if the Condesce doesn’t actually enter the new world, if say, Gamzee defeats her and does it instead, but either way, they fight and loose, and miss their chance to leave the game.

In learning to fight off Jade, Jake eventually develops the Hope bubble thing of his own accord, and they are able to remove the Condesce’s control of Jane through hacking. Jade probably gets knocked out too, but not killed.

As she comes round, they have a dark version of the lillypad chat, with the door closed and used up, similar to the experience of the trolls when their session backfired.

Jade is really sorry about everything, but brings a message from when she was knocked out, which we treat as a flashback. She meets Calliope in the dream bubbles, who explains that her life of suffering is some awful expression of the way the world needs to be, how there is another version of her out there who has had to deal with profound loneliness, but will eventually have a good life, but for her, the only solution is to face English directly.

This version of John can only jump randomly, without any control over where he goes. Fortunately, Rose can deal in randomness, so have to set things up so that when John jumps to the right place, they all come with him.

Then, this team embraces their fate as the doomed versions, takes on English, meets Vriska in the dream bubbles, and are destroyed heroically in the final blackout.

There you have it, three timelines, one ending in game over, the other ending in English’s creation and defeat, and one ending in victory. Or to put it another way, we have the Death and Fireworks ending, the Tragic Time Loop ending, and the Truman Show ending, which has them leave the comic at the moment they open the door.

This would emphasise that the victory of completing the alpha session is specifically about dodging Fate; Vriska does upstage them, and steal their plot importance, but in doing so dooms herself. And at their own diminished levels of importance, they save the day, don’t go for aaaaaaaall the achievements, but complete the game and have a nice life.

So first, a short moan, and then, an attempt to think about what the end needs to finish it off.

Looking back I’ve noticed two missed opportunities in the collide flash, the first is that Jade’s teleporting doesn’t give the impression of her teleporting them away from each other to form a break in the fight, and them teleporting in response, it’s a little too close to those anime credit’s sequences where they use effects to make more use of stock art.

The second missed opportunity is that as far as I can tell the firefly isn’t actually saying anything. It’s all B’s and V’s. In the time and speed allotted by the beats of the music, there could have fitted in between 15 and 20 characters, only enough time to say something simple like:

“You can do it!”

or

“You’re so close!”

But something that would nevertheless have a lot of value, both on an emotional level, and as a reward for close reading.

Other than that I’m pretty happy for it as what it is, a representation of a big fight, with all kinds of little jokes stacked into it.

I’ve been thinking that the thing that most makes sense as a Homestuck epilogue is actually something like paradox space. I found that that set of webcomics worked best when fitting mood pieces and highly stylized elaborations into the gaps on the main comic. For example, the Felt story is great, as are a number of other stories in it, particularly those that focus on embracing the characters and situations they work with.

The natural epilogue would fit things like that, telling us moments of Jane with her Dad, the kids collecting the rabbit items to send back and having stuff happen around it, absurd wars between living imps from the beta planets and skeleton armies from the alphas casting a small salamander as Napoleon, the continuing adventures of Diamonds while he avoids the battles of Collide. Or Gamzee being stuck in a fridge in Terezi’s pocket trying to influence things with his mind powers.

Stuff that fills in the gaps in a well written and drawn but low drama way.

But what about the high drama people were expecting?

Well I don’t think that’s epilogue material exactly. More like a short companion series or something.

Second reaction “homestuck is my favorite anime”, well, not my favorite...

Third reaction.

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What this ending establishes definitively is that they win, but not why, how or any of it’s substantial details.

It is essentially a placeholder, leading up to the infini-pause, where the story actually reaches conclusion in what I was previously jokingly calling to myself:

Revenge of Rebuild of End of Homestuck Gaiden Perfect.

People have suggested that Homestuck would actually end, after the death of the author, in some kind of multiple choice reader suggestion thing.

Well, it seems we are left with no other option!

The mythic structure remains; Calliope destroys the green sun, Vriska heralds the return of the first four kids (who we never saw leave), but what happens in between? What happens after?

Jade was great, “cut it out you two!”. Perhaps not a surprise in hindsight that dog loyalty didn’t overrule PM’s loyalty to WV.

And thrown swords continued to be ludicrously effective, though not as I expected.

Random thoughts, does this mean that Calliborn has now killed Yaldabaoth twice? Once with a crowbar, once with his avatar’s exploding black hole head? Could have been in a different part of the planet though.

Also, his clock seems to have three options, although that would presumably mean more ways to die rather than less, so perhaps it’s just a hacked clock.

Dirk was rezzed through some timeline-tree-search-combo fraymotif, not Jane’s abilities, so he can be back. And not surprisingly, Dave is much happier using time-travel to help his friends rather than as a weapon or logistical tool.

I also had a nasty feeling that Jane might end up killing HIC, setting her up for that servant immortality thing, although I thought that might be a later flash.

Tight plotting predictions require impossible standards, so this probably won’t be what comes off, but I’d like to think it will be.

First off we have the dogs of night and day, fighting directly against each other with presumably equal levels of power from the two queen rings, but different levels of motivation.

There’s two obvious ways this can go, the first is that Jade turns up with a rolled up newspaper, stops them fighting, tells PM that the Mayor is alive, and somehow gets Jack on side to prioritise stabbing someone else. I don’t see an obvious target for this unfortunately, as he’s basically devoted himself to mass destruction for ages, and the obvious target of a new Black Queen is the last person you want him anywhere near.

So there’s the other natural alternative we’ve been expecting for ages, a swordfight, and because it’s one within an area where green sun powers work, this doesn’t need to be limited to wherever they start off. As they stab at each other, they can teleport dodge, counter teleport, and generally bounce around the game world in an extremely dense series of wipes and transitions, followed around by vast amounts of green fire.

Which means they can appear and disappear throughout other people’s situations, which is pretty nice!

A tidy ending for this fight would be pretty simple to set up, Jack gets pissed off, unleashes the miles, PM zips behind him while he's focused on that, takes his hand off. Deringed, depowered, dead. Or imprisoned if Jade turns up then. That gives them the ring they need without any awkward stuff about Calliope offering to sacrifice herself to save/start the universe.

The other two fights aren’t that complex; we’re talking massive beam firing people fighting four people trying to distract them, one of whom cannot fly. The symmetry between HIC and Bowling Ball Eyes have been established previously, and both teams also have a different timeline’s version of the same unbreakable sword playing some part.

One thing that breaks the symmetry is that, as has been pointed out by others, Kanaya and co. have much less reason for fighting HIC than they do Bowling Ball Eyes, although actually trying to negotiate could run up against the specifics of the servant-immortality curse. My main concern in the Hic-fight beyond the usual eyebeams, is telekinetic use of swords and tridents as projectiles, which has been shown to be surprisingly effective in the past. My hope is that we get John and Jane teaming up to pull off distracting practical jokes as their primary battle strategy. Bowling Ball Fight is probably straightforward but inconclusive acrobatics, as I doubt even green sun powered twinking will be sufficient firepower to get through his invincibility.

Finally we have Jake fighting the Felt - I’m going to skip out things in the land of the dead because that is more likely to be under secret endgame tricks involving previously unrevealed mechanics.

But Jake vs the Felt is something with a lot of interesting connotations. Some people think that the Felt will act out of some mixture of sympathy and pity, or that he will get bailed out by the skeleton army. Those work, but they’re not as dramatically interesting as considering that he’s fighting an inept group of time travellers. He has a lot of growing to do, and needs an example of standing up for himself without being outclassed by Dirk or Aranea or Robo-Jane. Ok, he doesn’t need it, but I think it would do him some good.

So even if he communicates with them, I can see him starting to come to some arrangement, then committing nonetheless to a bit of “roughhousing” for the sake of some approximation of gentlemanly honour, and starting off by hitting Sawbuck, and beginning his journey through time. (And there’s loads of time available for it too; the whole trickster chapter that technically precedes this one chronologically)

If only Die still had his doll, you could also have them make a pin for Jake, (possibly instantly via going back to prepare) all grab the doll and jump to a timeline where he was dead. Of course, the most obvious dead-Jake timeline is Game Over, leaving them floating in a space full of shards, thinking better of it and flipping back. This would also justify the existing alternative timeline ghosts by having that timeline be reached via "conventional" time travel. (Although it looks like the intention is that remember also does that.) That's not going to happen probably, but it would be fun.