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Ammat The Ankh posted:Scratch may be an rear end in a top hat, but he's a magnificent rear end in a top hat. This may be why I unironically enjoyed the Scratch updates.
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May 12, 2012 04:10
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Well Manicured Man posted:I wasn't. Equius's death was drat sad. He seemed to enjoy it. 
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May 12, 2012 04:43
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Evil Mastermind posted:I don't know if posting fanart here is cool since the PYF thread seems to have dropped into the archives, but... Can we still do that thing where we request avatar sized versions of stuff? Because this would make a perfect avatar.
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May 12, 2012 05:43
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Hussie please update on my birthday. You have an hour and a half left. 
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May 12, 2012 06:37
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Silva posted:Can we still do that thing where we request avatar sized versions of stuff? Because this would make a perfect avatar.     Hopefully there are within the size limit, I forget what it is off the top of my head.
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May 12, 2012 09:03
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The limit is 30k, so these should all be fine.
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May 12, 2012 09:07
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Seoinin posted:Doc Scratch 
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May 12, 2012 11:14
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I think it's interesting that in pre scratch alternia, the rankings of blood the were reversed, with purples at the bottom as the ultimate subordinates and reds at the top who answer to nobody. It puts a completely different spin on the nature of the sufferer. In pre scratch, a troll born with karkat's candy red blood mutation would have been revered as someone who occupies a hitherto-unseen top slot in the hemospectrum. It's probably from this position of power that he was able to preach peace and serenity and love and stuff...
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May 12, 2012 12:47
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I doubt that the caste rankings were actually reversed. I think what Aranea is talking about is more like a benevolent dictatorship, actually. The higher castes still have longer lives and much more power, but the way their society is built leads them to act for the good of those under them. A1 Feferi probably has near-absolute power, but she's trying to use it entirely for the good of her subjects. Lowbloods don't have any power at all. Rather, more of a great lack of responsibility and an entire structure of people above them trying to ensure that their short lives are meaningful and happy. Honestly sounds like a rather stifling and constraining sort of society to me, on any level.
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May 12, 2012 12:57
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Tollymain posted:Honestly sounds like a rather stifling and constraining sort of society to me, on any level. A scathing criticism of socialist ideology. Vriska (Vriska) would agree.
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May 12, 2012 13:02
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What's baffling me is exactly why would a species expend so much care on its weakest members? It is literally the opposite of what would make evo-psych sense, unless there is some as-yet unrevealed detail about the lower castes. Or Aranea is blatantly lying or privileged to the point of delusion.
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May 12, 2012 13:10
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Cardinal Ximenez posted:What's baffling me is exactly why would a species expend so much care on its weakest members? It is literally the opposite of what would make evo-psych sense, unless there is some as-yet unrevealed detail about the lower castes. You might as well ask why humans care for sick or disabled people. Trollitarianism! Plus, the lowbloods have almost all the psychic powers, which is a valuable resource in itself if you really must get all Randian about it.
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May 12, 2012 13:19
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Pre-scratch Alternia is exactly the kind of society post-scratch Feferi wanted to make. Pre-scratch Feferi was (presumably) the Empress. I think that pretty much explains it.
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May 12, 2012 13:28
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Well it stands to reason that if post-Scratch Alternia is a libertarian social-darwinist nightmare, then pre-Scratch Alternia is going to be the kind of goofy totalitarian morass that conservatives imagine when they hear the world "socialism". NO FAIRNESS DOCTRINE TROLLBAMA DONT TRED ON ME
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May 12, 2012 13:30
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Cardinal Ximenez posted:What's baffling me is exactly why would a species expend so much care on its weakest members? It is literally the opposite of what would make evo-psych sense, unless there is some as-yet unrevealed detail about the lower castes. That's not surprising, considering evo-psych is utter dross as it relates to advanced, functional societies! Cabbit fucked around with this message at 14:54 on May 12, 2012 |
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May 12, 2012 14:49
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What we've heard of A1 suggests its society was peaceful to the point of being unable to produce heroes capable of seeing their Sgrub to a victorious conclusion. That is to say, it was a utopia to the extent that A2 was a dystopia. Mythology would be a more accurate source of comparison than politics. A1 corresponds to the pastoral utopian ideal, a psychic alien Arcadia. An important part of the Arcadian myth is that it's in the past, and has been lost forever. It can be compared to the idea of innocence - it's said to be both innocent of the crimes pervading the society from which it's looked back on, and innocent of the knowledge needed to protect itself. It is not, itself, a civilization, but rather said to be the natural state of things, free from brutal, mechanistic "civilizing" influences pursuing their various goals. This is part of a recurring tradition that sees society degenerating through a succession of morally inferior eras until the present. I'm gonna call this one like I see it. The Golden Age is a time of stability, innocence, harmony, plenty, and good times; the natural order has stood since the dawn of time and everything's just great. This is followed by a Silver Age, whose inhabitants grow complacent with the ease of their lives, and unwittingly invent ways to gently caress it up by turning away from the gods; there's still much that is worth defending in this time, but the seeds of evil have been planted. This gives way to the Bronze Age, also called the Heroic Age, when the strife of the Silver Age gives way to war; this introduces greatness and glory, but also new suffering and violence. Last comes the Iron Age, which is always the present, in which even the meager nobility of heroes has been lost, and evil is the default state of existence. The time fuckery of Homestuck means that we can assign the golden age to A1, which is long-lost; the silver age to B1, which was ignorant of the circumstances of its creation and thought itself unique in the universe; the bronze age to B2, where heroes and gods are uniting for a fierce battle while the previous age goes to ruin; and the iron age to A2, whose miserable society of brutal despotism has been arranged according to the whims of a trans-universal incarnation of ultimate evil. That's not quite chronological, but it does allow for the slightly more modern notion of a happy ending that's a new beginning, as well as being consistent with the depiction of troll society being more extreme in most obvious ways in comparison to human society. This story is really something.
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May 12, 2012 15:32
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Cabbit posted:That's not surprising, considering evo-psych is utter dross as it relates to advanced, functional societies!
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May 12, 2012 16:04
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Bongo Bill posted:What we've heard of A1 suggests its society was peaceful to the point of being unable to produce heroes capable of seeing their Sgrub to a victorious conclusion. Eh, I'm not sure this is really the case. A1's game was glitched out, the players didn't create themselves (and presumably as a result, the game was probably pretty hosed up and/or unwinnable regardless of how good your players are.)
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May 12, 2012 16:07
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What with all the self-causation of everything ever, I'm not sure how much genuine difference there is between the players being unable to end up creating themselves because they're unprepared for the game on one hand and the game being unwinnable so as to prevent them from creating themselves on the other, but:Aranea posted:My group of twelve played the game, 8ut failed. It overwhelmed us. A lot went wrong. The reckoning destroyed our 8attlefield well 8efore we had any hope of winning. So far my reading would be not that the A1 session was especially bizarre, but that circumstances conspired to deliver into it a group of thoroughly unready players, who then were forced to abandon the attempt and scratch, causing the reset timeline which eventually resulted in their own creation.
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May 12, 2012 16:14
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Got Book 2 today, I'm surprised it got here so fast, I only ordered it a couple days ago. It makes Book 1 look kinda tiny in comparison.
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May 12, 2012 16:41
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Yeah, Book 2 is pretty hefty. So is the embossment. 
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May 12, 2012 16:47
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Bongo Bill posted:What we've heard of A1 suggests its society was peaceful to the point of being unable to produce heroes capable of seeing their Sgrub to a victorious conclusion. That is to say, it was a utopia to the extent that A2 was a dystopia. What a great analysis! Kudos on a cool post.
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May 12, 2012 16:57
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Ammat The Ankh posted:It may have helped that I read all his dialogue in the voice of Rod Serling. I thought I was the only one. I guess I really am the only one who was okay with Equius dying though. Seriously, worst troll.
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May 12, 2012 17:32
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Hamiltonian Bicycle posted:So far my reading would be not that the A1 session was especially bizarre, but that circumstances conspired to deliver into it a group of thoroughly unready players, who then were forced to abandon the attempt and scratch, causing the reset timeline which eventually resulted in their own creation. Hmm. Now that we know how the scratch works (redirects the meteors carrying the ectobabies to different arrival times) I'm not sure how it's even possible for the A1 players and ancestors to have not been spawned in their own session. If that's true, the scratch shouldn't have done anything, and trying to wrap my head around how they could possibly be spawned in A2 and get to A1 is giving me a headache. Either there's more to a scratch than Rose has figured out, or there's shenanigans going on. Best theory I can come up with is that some other important thing on a meteor had it's arrival time changed and that changed history, but what about the players and ancestors? How did they get to A1? Cross-timeline appearifier/sendificator tech like what Jade and Jake are using? But they still had to be sent back in time within A2 itself too. Mmmmaybe once Karkat had created them, they got sendificated right into the middle of A1's reckoning, went back in time to become their A1 selves, then the scratch switched things around just like for B1/B2? Now that I think about it, we never did see how the B1 kids and guardians got from the lab and onto the meteors. They just kind of disappeared and reappeared.
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May 12, 2012 17:45
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Quoting this from a few pages back, because I've just thought of something.loquacius posted:I bet we're going to see an update called "[S]Page: Turn." before this is all over. "[S]Page: Get ripped" perhaps, recalling that Dirk's robot is turning Jake into a killing machine?
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May 12, 2012 17:50
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Feranon posted:I thought I was the only one. I STRONGly disagree. Did you just skip all the dialogue in [S] Seek the highb100d?? Signing a couple thousand books must kill your hand. My book got here and it looks like Hussie signed his name Andwiiv. Also the postman jammed it in my mailbox and bent up the corners of the book. 
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May 12, 2012 19:36
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Cardinal Ximenez posted:What's baffling me is exactly why would a species expend so much care on its weakest members? It is literally the opposite of what would make evo-psych sense, unless there is some as-yet unrevealed detail about the lower castes. Did she mention anything about the mother grub/lusus system being present in A1? That makes no evolutionary sense. I had assumed it was a system set in place by the Condesce to weaken trolls' attachments to each other, but I guess we thought that about the blood castes as well.
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May 12, 2012 19:59
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Dr Christmas posted:Did she mention anything about the mother grub/lusus system being present in A1? That makes no evolutionary sense. I had assumed it was a system set in place by the Condesce to weaken trolls' attachments to each other, but I guess we thought that about the blood castes as well. "Evolutionary sense" is a pretty nebulous idea. There exist plenty of parasitic/symbiotic relationships between species in nature. Besides which, the mother grub is actually necessary for troll reproduction so if she even could be part of a system set in place by Lord English/Doc Scratch (not the Condesce), it would be a pretty huge, strange development for that to be the case - they'd have to fundamentally alter the genetics of the entire species.
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May 12, 2012 20:04
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The mother grub is just the female sex of the troll species. The male sex is all the rest of the trolls, who contribute genetic material but don't incubate. The fact that the male sex has effeminate and masculine social genders is the weird thing, not that they're a hive species where the drones and the workers are a merged morphology. It's pretty hard to discount a fictional ecology like this one as not making evolutionary sense, though, when we've really only got ours to compare it to, and we still don't have a complete understanding of, for example, the circumstances surrounding the eukaryotic genesis. The antecedents of the cells which now comprise your stomach were quite probably a different organism altogether than the ones that comprise your bone-marrow, and the fact that you consider your rear end in a top hat to be the same species as your face is only because of a symbiotic union that started in the primordial ooze. What I'm saying is, you know, just, like... Whatever, man.
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May 12, 2012 20:36
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creationist believer posted:I STRONGly disagree. Did you just skip all the dialogue in [S] Seek the highb100d?? I read all the dialogue, I just don't care for his personality. He and Eridan are both creepy insecure shitbags imo. I can actually tolerate Eridan a little more since at least he looks kinda cool and doesn't have the loving horse fetish thing going on. Then again I'm not a big fan of Nepeta either and she seems to be a fan favorite so maybe I'm just a soulless jerk v  v
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May 12, 2012 21:26
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Feranon posted:I read all the dialogue, I just don't care for his personality. He and Eridan are both creepy insecure shitbags imo. I can actually tolerate Eridan a little more since at least he looks kinda cool and doesn't have the loving horse fetish thing going on. The things you don't like about Equius are the very things that make most people love him. Because you see, that poo poo's hilarious.
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May 12, 2012 21:30
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Equius isn't insecure. Frankly, I don't think any of the other trolls know what they want nearly as well as Equius does.
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May 12, 2012 21:31
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Kit Walker posted:Equius isn't insecure. Frankly, I don't think any of the other trolls know what they want nearly as well as Equius does. Equius is sort of defined by not knowing what he wants though. The entire comedy of his character is that he gets off on subverting the same social rules that he worships, causing him to dither comically between the two extremes.
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May 12, 2012 21:33
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Android Blues posted:Equius is sort of defined by not knowing what he wants though. The entire comedy of his character is that he gets off on subverting the same social rules that he worships, causing him to dither comically between the two extremes. The difference is that he's not indecisive. He acts that way because he's getting off on it, not because he's not sure of what he should be doing. And that's part of the joke.
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May 12, 2012 21:35
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Greyscale Skies posted:
First one works just fine. Thanks a lot!
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May 12, 2012 21:40
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So, random musing, in this gap between updates. One of the themes that was going on in Act 5 was sort of a "Winning the game vs. Winning it right" That was mostly typified by the fact the troll kids ended up ignoring their denizens and just killing them as fast as possible. It seems like that is sort of an inversion of the bargain the original troll players made with Echidna, although perhaps they phrased their wish in a suboptimal sense (always have contract lawyers with you when you talk to genies!). Either way, this feels like it ties back into The Ultimate Riddle. It seems like Sburb or whatever is causing its various iterations is pretty loving bullshit what with not only the requisite destruction of the players homeworld, but also the personal suffering it inflicts on the kids who have to play it. And that's not even getting into the fact it apparently allows a hitchhiker that eats universes. What I'm getting to is what exactly is the point of all this? Jaspers was pretty emphatic on Rose going on her own personal quest, and the alt-John seemed to have learned something very important from Typheus. It seems like The Ultimate Reward is kinda overrated. We haven't seen a session where the players actually go through the things the game wants them to do (the trolls were overly focused on murdering everything, the kids had to basically skip 2/3rds to not die) so I'm kind of curious if Hussie is going to get back to the underlying mythology and purpose of the game itself. I imagine he's kept the Denizens off-screen for an important reason like that.
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May 13, 2012 01:17
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Eikre posted:What I'm saying is, you know, just, like... Whatever, man. This is honestly the right attitude to take. I doubt Hussie has thought about it that much. He just made them mostly human and then went back later and gave them nonhuman traits later to make them more alien. Trying to justify it is an exercise in frustration. That said... Eikre posted:The mother grub is just the female sex of the troll species. The male sex is all the rest of the trolls, who contribute genetic material but don't incubate. The fact that the male sex has effeminate and masculine social genders is the weird thing, not that they're a hive species where the drones and the workers are a merged morphology. It's worse than that, I'm afraid. Recall that we've seen a mother grub (Kanaya's lusus) and it's an entirely different species than the trolls. While it certainly has social reverence, it is a lusus like all the rest. So it's not so much that the mother grub is the female of the species, but that trolls are a one-gender (in terms of reproduction capacity) species in a symbiotic reproduction relationship with another species, almost like bees and flowers, rather than just bees. (Short version: bees collect nectar from flowers, also get pollen as a side effect. Ranging from flower to flower benefits the bee by getting food and benefits the flower by spreading the pollen to other flowers, aiding reproduction) Now, as to why they still have visual symptoms of genders? That requires an rear end-pull of one kind or another. One simple explanation would be, earlier in the troll evolutionary cycle, they actually did reproduce alone and gender had some purpose, but that, over millions of years, it became an outdated trait. In real life, we've got weird leftovers of our evolutionary path, like the appendix or the 'gill slits' (pharyngeal pouches) that form on a human embryo and become things like gills in fish but develop into things like the middle ear for us. You could theorize, with their insect-like biology, dependence on other organisms (lusus) to survive, and the fact that matriorbs can be found inside another species that troll evolved from some form of parasite, like the tick or the leech, that survives by taking resources from other species, and perhaps reproduced by somehow injecting chemicals into the mother grub that produced a matriorb. Bobulus fucked around with this message at 01:37 on May 13, 2012 |
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May 13, 2012 01:32
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Suaimhneas posted:Hmm. Now that we know how the scratch works (redirects the meteors carrying the ectobabies to different arrival times) I'm not sure how it's even possible for the A1 players and ancestors to have not been spawned in their own session. If that's true, the scratch shouldn't have done anything, and trying to wrap my head around how they could possibly be spawned in A2 and get to A1 is giving me a headache. Either there's more to a scratch than Rose has figured out, or there's shenanigans going on. It's not that much of a stretch, as Skaian technology has already proven capable of going through time and pre/post scratch timelines seamlessly. Do you remember the Robo Bunny? Jake sends it from the B2 session to the B1 session into Jade's past. Without the B1 session, the B2 session wouldn't have existed at all, and the timeline was partially set into motion by the Robo Bunny, which in setting into motion events in B1 helped usher in B2. Now, imagine the Robo Bunny was the A1 Trolls. Similarly, they were sent back into the past into a different timeline, which they would need to interact with to create the timeline from whence they came. Eikre posted:It's pretty hard to discount a fictional ecology like this one as not making evolutionary sense, though, when we've really only got ours to compare it to, and we still don't have a complete understanding of, for example, the circumstances surrounding the eukaryotic genesis. The antecedents of the cells which now comprise your stomach were quite probably a different organism altogether than the ones that comprise your bone-marrow, and the fact that you consider your rear end in a top hat to be the same species as your face is only because of a symbiotic union that started in the primordial ooze. This has been my opinion all along when it comes to troll biology. People seem really ready to discredit it as 'unrealistic' or making no sense, when there's still a few things about biology on EARTH we still don't understand, and comparing an alien(emphasis on the meaning of that word!) biology to our own is always going to be weird.
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May 13, 2012 02:02
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Midnight Raider posted:This has been my opinion all along when it comes to troll biology. People seem really ready to discredit it as 'unrealistic' I'm gonna steal an example for a second.Think about Draculas for a second. More importantly how exactly do you kill a dracula? Like make a list, poo poo. It doesn't matter because they aren't real. You can make up any arbitrary rule you want because in your story that's simply just how it works. On top of that, it's already explained that they played a part in creating our universe.
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May 13, 2012 02:24
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Ominous Jazz posted:It doesn't matter though because they aren't real. It doesn't serve the story in any way to be concerned about how it doesn't make sense because for the purpose of the story it does make sense. And even the parts that don't make sense are because Hussie wanted them to not make sense and be confusing and irritating to the audience.
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