The Webcomics Review

Bro, Homestuck, you can't go like six weeks without an update and then update twice in rapid succession during SpiderForest application review.

I actually got a Saffsage page written today, I'm prepping for a Pathfinder game tomorrow, I was productive, and now this is happening.

This being....whatever this is? Looks like Ly'lac is talking to TC, the mirthful purple mastermind. Are we going to get some deep lore? Perhaps a new idea? There's at least a narwhal going on.

I gotta be honest, I'm insanely busy (work, SpiderForest applications, actually writing my own comic at some point) and kind of burnt on Homestuck but for some reason people like seeing my liveblogs enough to complain when I don't do them. Maybe I'm just in a mood because I can't drill the screws out of my good chair.

Oh, the "blood" prank again. REAL mature, guys.

Anyway all of Swiss' friends are dead. Wait, what?

Well at least it's quiet now.

Sorry, I know the reckoning is starting but did the whole frat just get murdered offscreen while Swiss was having a tantrum in the bathroom? What's going on? What are those gashes in Swiss' door?

Your boys are always warning you about your penchant for the dramatic. They say, Swiss, all you do is make yourself miserable. And for the first time ever, you're almost willing to consider their words on the matter.

Dramatic irony is a literary device where characters don't know something the audience does, such as here where Swiss decides to stop panicking on the same day his entire world is literally destroyed.

This nasty fuck is one of the few remaining SATANIMALS not sequestered off from polite society, and the only one you've ever had the profound displeasure of meeting. He tends to get out like this once or twice a lap, occasionally taking some lives and often wrecking your beautiful campus. It's tragic, but it's also a school tradition implemented 200 laps ago so there's no way that's ever going to end.

This is hardly unique to Beyond Canon, it's a problem with any IP that gets new writers, but....we did this. This is a reference to Humanimals which in addition to never being funny or liked by anyone was also already the basis for the Lusii. This is just ideas Hussie had twenty years ago getting reheated. And not even his good ideas!

Homestuck 2 had the issue a lot of IPs had (Star Wars most famously) where a huge creative world of infinite possibility got shrank down and down and down until there were only twenty people in the multiverse who mattered at all. Beyond Canon was moving away from that a little with a bunch of new species on a new planet, but the Deltritans were already Trolls 2 and we don't need to be reusing their gimmicks. This goals for the Narwhal, too, by the way. We did ancestors already!

GOOD HEAVENS WHAT IN THE HELL IS THAT?

Anyway I guess Swiss's exile is Jane since they say "good heavens" unironically but aren't going wildly over the top with the old-timeyness like Jake does.

KILL THAT FUCKING THING NOW!!

This is, to be fair, the first sensible reaction anyone has had to literally anything in this entire franchise.

There's no exact consensus on the origin of SATANIMALS, but despite their myriad wretched forms all of them seem to exhibit some degree of satyrical anatomical features, or rough equivalents to them, and they're occasionally disturbingly genetically proximal to satyrkind. Everyone pretends this makes them special and worth preserving but you're of the opinion that they are hideous mistakes made by god. Unfortunately, the Exemplar seems to adore them, so they get to continue their shameful existences frolicking and rampaging across gorgeous national parks and nature preserves that would be much better suited to the frolicking and rampaging of satyrs.

I suppose if there's anyone to blame for reheating old Homestuck ideas no one liked the first time, it's "The Exemplar" (aka Dirk).

Oh no not Serenity 2. Serenibee.

....There's a 50/50 chance she's actually named Serenibee.

Anyway that's enough of that.

GC: wait. GC: delfi wtf is this...? GC: DEL'FI??? GC: how did you get this??? GC: ... GC: ... GC: THANK YOU??? GC: omg omg. GC: THIS IS CRAZY!!!

I think one of my favorite parts about Swan Boy is that it's built around a 3-person friend group but two of the three people actively dislike each other.

And I like it because it's sort of preposterous and leads to jokes but there's enough dregs of backstory that I still understand why they sometimes hang out together in the first place.

I'm most just saying this as an excuse to let people know The Golden Boar is off hiatus, but I'm intrigued by this wrinkle in a "tournament arc" where actually winning or losing the fight doesn't strictly matter. Just sort of a novel idea I think.

Thanks for waiting.

>Be the baby.

I know it's a separate update, but if the next page says "the baby is you" I'm going to be a little bit mad. We just did that joke two pages ago.

You cannot be the baby. Why in the world would you want to be a baby? Especially one so unfortunate to be born during THE GREAT LOSS.

Baby nymphs kind of look like baby Digimon but somehow even less detailed. Is this a flashback to the vaguely alluded to "first" reckoning?

[S] Ly'lac: Descend.

Oh no, it's the current one. RIP that baby, I guess. I do kind of like how the Homestuck 2 cast is actually integrated with their worlds and are inclined to miss them. John was the only character in Homestuck 1 to be sad that the entire fucking Earth exploded and he got over it in two lines of dialogue. HS2 is milking the horses a bit more. This is doubly interesting because we barely knew Deltritus and Earth C is so criminally underdeveloped that it's the one part of the old writing that the new writers openly complain about. Anyway, I'm procrastinating. You were [S]ing?

So this Flash appears to be Ly'lac irritated that she's slowly sinking because her ride is going down. Ly'Lac...you can swim. Right? Guess she's not feeling it? Or can the aquatic character actually not swim, which I guess would be a funny weakness.

We're not looking at the first reckoning, but we are getting some lore on the Uni-Nymph, whom Del'Fi was all about. He was a meteor kid, who landed on the surface and was raised as a Satyr despite being a...well, supposedly a Nymph, but those look like horse ears on his upper organon.

Then this twink shows up and he must be the...other guy....there was a Nymph and a Satyr and they created the game in Ye Olde times. What was this dude's name? I forget. Lemme go check the flash where it's revealed.

It's broke. Great. Awesome. To the wiki! The "Grey Rain" was caused by "an unspeakably evil satyr tyrant king and a scheming nymph enchantress", which I've been assuming are the same as the floaty twink and the Uni-Nymph but if these are ancestors then maybe not. I had it in my head that the King and Enchantress would be players in the existing session, but I guess you can't have a session without a Scratch. For some reason.

The Uni-Nymph is sold out to the Nymphs by his frat. Per Del'Fi, "There's no way she could have translated The Council's "reclamation" of the Uni-Nymph and the slaying of Barley Frat in a school AU", so these traitorous horses are presumably Barley Frat and presumably don't profit from whatever deal they're making here.

The twinky other guy is presumably the "Australian" who came to Barley Frat and "Danced them into the sea" from Swiss' lore books.

For a brief period, there was a fourth tier; a reclusive, monastic order of socially anxious isolationists. They spent the majority of their existence in unremarkable obscurity, contributing basically nothing, but their final decades were marked by a profound change: a commitment to revelry so infectious that it went on to fundamentally change the nature of satyr society, prompted by the appearance of a man who flew across the sea from the uninhabited Cursed Land, Australia. He catapulted their order to the highest echelons of power and influence, which you always found weird because he was just a savage degenerate. At any rate, that didn't last long, because at some point their so-called "revolutionary" danced them all into the sea. So you guess maybe he wasn't such a fucking cool guy after all.

Poor, sweet, dear, precious, Meemaw. She was so damn old.

Meemaw dies of....something. Fear, I guess? Ly'Lac eats her. No prototyping for you, Meemaw.

THE NARWHAL wants to speak with you.

(I also have a lot of feelings as a Jew about liberally throwing in Nazi symbols into your webcomic like the author does constantly but that’s a whole other discussion)

Hm. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it. I don't think characters need to look at the camera every now and then to be "FYI nazis are bad", and I certainly don't think Hans Vogel is Dead is pro-Nazi

See?

And I'm also cognizant of how "Something hasn't been addressed in a long time" is a subset of "webcomics take fucking forever to make".

But for a comic that sells itself as an anti-fascist comic about a nazi going to a fairy tale land and learning that fascism is bad, the whole "nazi" thing hasn't come up that much. Even the site's "about" page euphemistically calls him a "card-carrying party member" without mentioning the party, and Hans is established as being vaguely uncomfortable being a nazi from minute one, never wears a swastika, and conveniently dies in 1940 before the Holocaust begins. He's never presented as a Nazi that needs to unlearn fascism, he's presented as a decent dude who just kind of happened to be on the wrong side of the war and has already realized it. Even the shield that's supposedly representative of his dark past has a griffin on it instead of, say, a black eagle.

And I get it. It's completely understandable that you don't want your protagonist of your anti-fascist webcomic waving a swastika and going on rants about ridding the world of degenerates and shit. I can't imagine the discourse if that happened. (especially given that this comic started in 2015 and the real world context around fascism was about to change quite a bit). But there's a really strong tension between "The comic is about the evils of fascism and a fascist learning to change" and "I want my protagonist to not be a fucking nazi" and the comic is trying to split the difference in a way I don't think works. I'm a little worried that Reineke is going to be Jewish and that's why Hans literally can not see her as human because I don't think that metaphor's going to work at all.

I know I'm supposed to have "thoughts" and "analysis" and things but sometimes I just want to say "I have no fucking idea what's going on in this comic but it's pretty good and you should read it" and right now I'm feeling that way about Bleating Heart.

What's really throwing me is that this is an intermission that takes place twenty-ish years in the future of the main comic, and introduces a lot of romance drama that's extremely messy emotionally and literally for Clover and Devin, but it's an intermission and presumably we're going to go back to Clover and Devin as little kids where Clover's all like