sorry for taking so long to get back to you (im the "wowzers" anon) but yes! i can totally scream your ear off about this!
you talking about the routes in this game being a metaphor for college and purposes in life reminds me of what playing pqr has meant for me personally. i first found this game when jade's route was still being worked on (the "anticlimatic" update specifically) and its really so strange to see how much of my life has changed. a couple days after i started playing pqr i realized that i was going to have to move and it basically uprooted my life (realization not brought on by pqr just happened to be at around the same time). most of my plans for how i wanted to spend my life, seeing my friends, my career paths, kinda felt like they got eviscerated because of stuff out of my control. but i just like. ignored it and didnt really think about it :) at least until the move happened and it all came crashing down. im sorta better now, but still going through it. and. just seeing jade talk to kanaya and talk about not knowing where to go next or who exactly you are now plus the jade theme music playing in the background that i had listened to constantly while playing, replaying, and rereplaying jade's route. actually made me want to bawl my eyes out (in like a good way though lol). this game is so special to me. its been one of the main things in my life right now thats been keeping me going through it all. i love to go back to it and replay it comparing the older routes to the newer routes and see what references i missed. everytime i play it, it feels like a find something new. and i think even years after now and even if homestuck becomes a smaller part of my life, this game is going to stick with me forever. thank you so so so much.
also, on a sillier note, what the heckadoodle do you mean the fucking hampsters movie was real? i was just like oh haha thats a silly idea! a hamsters movie with the hamster dance! such a funny and fake thing to have in a homestuck fangame! its like guy fieri being the antichrist or gushers being made by a genocidal fish! silly fictional stories making up silly fictional things!
but like i looked it up and its real??? its fucking real????? its a movie i can watch with my very own two eyeballs. apparently fucking saberspark made a video about it?????? huh??????
actually i just realized this is probably very congruous with homestuck. because i do not know how to convey the shock i felt when i was in a convenience store and found out that faygo was real. and then the further shock when i realized that tab was real after telling myself that SURELY at least one drink in homestuck was fictional.
im not sure if you meant to send this to @pesterquestrewritten or not but. holy fucking shit this is one of the sweetest asks ive ever gotten of all time????? jesus christ. oh my god.
i dont think i need to say it but pqr has been a very similar lifeline for ME as well. like, ive been dealing with some pretty schnasty depression since/before leaving school. and, like, working on pesterquest rewritten, HAVING that outlet, that creative place to put my energies, its been so vital for me. and then hearing that its been the same for my READERS????? crazy. crazy wild shit
speaking of older routes, i DID actually go back and add one thing to the rose typewriter ending in the prologue, it uses a new renpy feature that i'd been asking for for months hahaha
and also, if you have the technical knowhow and youre curious, feel free to dig around the internals and find the hidden beta for bonus route 3. im not gonna tell you to not play it lmao
yeah! yeah yeah yeah yeah. im incredibly happy my writing has resonated. and that the silly puppet show i put on next to my writing has also resonated. its. yeah. waow
fun fact about the hampsterdance movie. one time when i was in high school i had a professor who was like "yeah i composed music for hampsterdance." and i was like ???? okay man. sure. because at the time that movie was lost media and nobody knew it existed. so i had no fuckin clue what that guy was talking about.
of course YEARS later it turns out that the movie DOES exist. and i looked up the credits and i dont THINK i see his name there? but its probably what hes talking about. if it isnt what hes talking about i have less of a fucking clue than anything at this point lmao
pqr likes to reference my other works a lot! for example, the chatroom called "the nexus" first appeared here, in my first published fic that was textually about ultaradia. youll sometimes find quotes or phrasing that match whatever other fanfic i was writing at the time, or, i mean, obviously, you've got the entire A Bed of Roses section, which USED to be a tribute to my longest work, and now is only a neat reference to my second-longest work. god damn, did pesterquest rewritten ever grow out of proportion lmao
yeah. i think the main thing is that i really could never have gotten as far as i did with pqr without my friends and creative collaborators, who have encouraged me forever one thousand years. pqr is a game about friendship, obviously, but the friendships that were integral in the CREATION of the game are even more important to me than the virtual ones tbh. i love everyone whos in the credits of the game very dearly
and thank u for reading and enjoying!!! i'll try and put out more for the kanayaroute bad end tonight :D