A Rambly Homestuck Reread

For quick reference if anyone wants or needs, I go by Gem and I use any pronouns. My hair is currently VERY blue, so feel free to inbox me blue hair and pronouns jokes lol. My favorite characters are the Striders, who I share far too much in common with, and I'll probably go on at least one Johndave-related rant during this liveblog because I fucking love Johndave.

Tags, which I'll put all of on this post for easy searching:

#gemposting - any post by me.

#reblog - any post not by me.

#gem liveblogs - all of the liveblog.

#not liveblog - anything else, other than my liveblog.

I think this one marks the start of Homestuck's trend thereafter of dropping exceptionally violent, high-octane, game-changing animations out of nowhere. There are so many like this from here on, right up to the end of Act 5. Only then does the number sort of taper off. But from this point on I just sorta started shoveling more and more red meat into the story's maw. This stretch is where I was starting to get a feel for this type of sensationalistic storytelling content as something I'd later code (mostly for my own internal purposes) as "meat," in the meat/candy binary of storycraft theory. 

Oh no. Not already. I'm not getting into the issue here. But yeah, there were a LOT of Flashes that were crazy sensational at this point.

Jack is so pissed at his queen. These two getting testy with each other is built into their relationship across all sessions. No matter what the specific situation, she's probably always finding ways to needle him. Dress code, paperwork, it doesn't matter. This is programmed into them as game constructs to guarantee that there will always be friction between them, which allows for more interesting variations in how any given game of Sburb can play out. There's always a powder keg of mutiny waiting to go off, and depending on the actions of the heroes, there are many, many ways this can play out over a session. We see one way right here, in this animation, and another in the troll session, with totally different results. But what remains constant is Jack's inclination to betray his queen.

This is also interesting - Jack is a game mechanic to make the session more interesting, which he certainly does in all versions of him we see.

Even though it lasts only about a second or two, this dress-up montage is kind of incredible when you think about what it implies. They're actually spending...hours, maybe?...trying out different clothes that Jack might like better. Think of what this means, and of all the actual conversations that have to take place between them to facilitate this. It shows the queen is actually willing to exercise some lenience and let Jack's taste determine the garb so long as it's sufficiently clown-princess themed. Jack also displays a surprising degree of patience in trying on so many variations. It also suggests that somewhere the queen has an entire wardrobe of this stuff ready to go.

As funny as all this is, my favorite details are the spades behind her (great foreshadowing at work once more) and the laughter in the song timed to her being shown. She's having entirely too much fun with all this and we all know it.

This brief interlude in the animation shows that Rose's dream self has finally woken up, due to her future doomed self going to sleep and "ceasing to exist." She has inherited some hazy memories from that version of her self, or if not all her memories per se, at least some of her perceptual faculty. Now she can see the graffiti she wrote on her walls, which previously was invisible to her due to some psychological block. This is the secret Jaspers once whispered to her, which was simply, "Meow." This word didn't really tell Rose's younger self anything informative so much as it unlocked information already in her brain, which was an important genetic sequence. She uses the letters of MEOW in place of the usual letters for genetic codes, GCAT.

This is definitely one of the wilder timeloop bullshit orchestrations, of which there are a good few. The engineering of Bec was a fantastic mystery to slowly figure out as the story went on. Also, we get to see the Guardians being cool, which is certainly neat.

Jack's mutiny, along with his ridiculous transformation, is complete. What a devil's bargain he just struck. In order to claim supreme power, he must agree to have the absurd attire he so vehemently resisted actually become physically inseparable from himself. Yet the choice he has made is clear. Power prevails over dignity. That said, being forced to look like a clown in exchange for this boon isn't exactly going to keep him in a good mood.

The first four lines Karkat says here literally sound like they could be a disgruntled Homestuck fan talking smack about me as they scan backwards through the story. Which sounds like a funny thing for me to say—and it is—but it's also not that remarkable, since at any given moment Homestuck is full of surrogates for various factions of the readership. Basically any character who is viewing the actions of other characters on a screen can be seen as a consumer of that story through some form of in-canon digital media. Whether they type in character commands like the exiles, or use Trollian to skip around the "archive" in a nonlinear way like the trolls do, for the sake of "adventure analysis" or to heap scorn on those involved, every narrative-viewing character is temporarily filling the role of the Homestuck reader from a certain angle. Later, cherubs become the ultimate distillation of the idea.

There's something kind of eerie about these stable time loops when it comes to the absurd, bitchy conversations the characters have with each other. There is literally no discernible origin to this prank John is playing. It's pasted to him from the future, he thinks it's a great prank, and he decides to play the prank in the future because of it, exactly as typed here. And yet, the whole exchange appears to be perfectly in character and in full alignment with their personalities. So entire exchanges between two individuals can be totally without origin, yet still sound exactly like them. This opens up a whole bunch of creepy possibilities. Ghosts or afterimages of their personalities seemingly can emerge from pure void in a convincing way, like bodiless simulacra. Echoing time loop mimic-wraiths, intruding on their conversations.

While I know about the Cherubs as a reflection of readership (Callie being a parody of Homestuck lovers and Caliborn of Homestuck haters), and the Alpha Trolls as a caricature of people (Porrim of feminists, Kankri of Tumblrinas, Horuss of systems, etc - a writing choice I'm not a fan of), I admittedly never thought of the Beta Trolls and exiles as fulfilling a similar purpose, albeit more subtly. The trolls often echo or mock our thoughts on what's going on in the story, and provide meta-commentary while still being IN the story.

And then there's commentation on the unsettling nature of time loops and, seemingly, dream bubbles. Stable time loops police characters into having perfectly replicated conversations with no origin, a deviation from which would get them all killed. Creepy shit.

Also, apparently, the concepts of Ancestors and the hemospectrum weren't present/fleshed out at this point. Also, this:

From my perspective, the great thing about this stupid backwards conversation was that any time someone wanted to know the answer to an obvious question, like "What's the point of the game?", and I didn't think it was time to reveal that info yet, I could just have this jerk say "I ALREADY TOLD YOU THAT" and justifiably be reluctant to repeat himself. But he would indulge in other details of lesser importance, like the material here about the Veil. He hasn't mentioned that yet, so he can take some time to cover it now. It's a totally organic and logical way of concealing critical story information so that it flows in an order of least critical to most critical.