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Nope still not liking this. Like this bit: A fascin8ting thing a8out cheru8 reproduction is how the parent's alignment is passed on to the young. If the male lays the egg, the alignments of the child's two halves will 8e the same as the parents. If the female lays the egg, the alignments will 8e flipped, and the young male and female halves will 8e endowed with opposite alignments of the parents. Who even gives a gently caress? How is this interesting or relevant in any way? I mean I'm fine with ~worldbuilding~ but really? We get this but stuff like what, exactly, the Exiles were trying to do is left for us to infer? I get that Aranea's supposed to be all about the stupid details, it's just that at this point I'm finding it hard to distinguish between what we're supposed to take as true and what's extraneous. I mean, I compare the information flow from Acts 1-5 where info came slowly and had to be pieced together, and where the people who did know stuff were generally kind of cagey about it, or that the information could be wrong or incomplete for whatever reason. In act 6 (and a bit in Act 5 with the ancestor stuff) we've just gotten all these straight up info dumps where we have no reason to believe the source is wrong or lying, and we the audience just absorb it as true. So really we're not say, taking John's position as he tries to wrangle what he can out of Karkat, we're just the audience listening to Hussie monologue. In that case we just have to take this as the Word of Hussie and accept them at face value. But in that case, I really gotta wonder about little details like above. Is that something Hussie thought was interesting and we should pay attention to? Or something only Aranea thought was interesting? If the second, then that moves the story out of word of Hussie territory and back into 'character's interpretation' territory but then we don't know what else is just her interpretation and and and ugh I don't even know what I'm trying to say. Or maybe that whole 'gender of the parent determines disposition of the child' will be relevant but I just... really don't think that detail's necessary. Also I'm not really a fan of this whole 'genetically predetermined to be nice/an rear end' thing the cherubs have going on. It just runs so counter to the ongoing theme of people's choices and free will being important. Like I think if Caliborn freely chose to be a monster that'd be a lot more thematically resonant than him just being a dick by birth. Or something? I have additional complaints about the cherubs but I'll spare you. gently caress, chances are there's gonna be some development down the line that completely invalidates this giant wall of text I just wrote.
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Mar 10, 2013 03:41
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Hey, if the male had won, Caliborn would have been a green son. 
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Mar 10, 2013 03:44
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Mazerunner posted:Nope still not liking this. Because lord english is calliope from a post scratch timeline where her father won the duel, obviously
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Mar 10, 2013 03:49
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Mazerunner posted:Like I think if Caliborn freely chose to be a monster that'd be a lot more thematically resonant than him just being a dick by birth. Except he did have a choice. Not whether to be a dick or not, but he chose to kill Calliope and short-circuit his predominate. Everything about Caliborn and Lord English stems from this action.
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Mar 10, 2013 03:53
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Freudian posted:Except he did have a choice. Not whether to be a dick or not, but he chose to kill Calliope and short-circuit his predominate. Everything about Caliborn and Lord English stems from this action. A dickhead by birth, a monster by choice.
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Mar 10, 2013 03:55
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Now he's an invincible rear end in a top hat. I'm sure his terrifying giant snake dude-mother would be proud.
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Mar 10, 2013 03:58
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No.44 posted:Now he's an invincible rear end in a top hat. I'm sure his terrifying giant snake dude-mother would be proud. I think that his father would be the proud one.
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Mar 10, 2013 04:00
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Ariong posted:I think that his father would be the proud one. It was the male cherub that laid the egg. The nice lady cherub was technically their father.
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Mar 10, 2013 04:04
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Ariong posted:I think that his father would be the proud one.
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Mar 10, 2013 04:05
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Hamiltonian Bicycle posted:Gamzee must have been pretty elated to find a big stripy clown egg. He found an Easter Egg, just in time for March!  Mazerunner posted:Nope still not liking this. Counterpoint: Hussie's several-page essay on how Troll quadrants work, Rose's Gamefaqs guide, both of the Lalonde's fanfics, Mindfang's Pir8 diaries, and many things Doc Scratch says when he's not being cagey. Not to mention the increasingly massive recaps Hussie did, which crossed the line of things even I was hesitant to slog through at times. The comic has already been full of long diatribes about things which are full of sometimes-interesting information, but seem to almost be written as a dare to see how long reader's attention spans can go. Aranea and oftentimes UU embody a spirit of  infodumping which was already there. Mazerunner posted:gently caress, chances are there's gonna be some development down the line that completely invalidates this giant wall of text I just wrote. This line right here is basically what comes to mind half the time people react to any big update.
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Mar 10, 2013 04:06
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Grrl Anachronism posted:Wait, how were you born? well, normally humans hatch... from like these slimy pods. then we wriggle out as a little pink larva.
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Mar 10, 2013 04:13
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If the Cherubs were never "destined" to play sburb the way the human and troll groups were, that might explain the lack of ectobiology. I was going to say that they didn't have a frog-temple either, but I guess the B2-Earth one is probably still there, somewhere. On a tangent, I've been wondering for a while what the deal is, exactly, with "jujus". Caliborn and Calliope basically act like it's stuff that follows specific rules, but the actual mechanisms behind them are unknowable. Like the chains that bound their legs. That's not something that was already on Earth when their egg hatched. Someone (Gamzee?) had to set that up. UU and uu's understanding of jujus is like a child's impression of the rules laid down by a parent. "Because I said so" works for a kid, but not for an adult. Betting the next bit of the exposition is explaining how exactly these two came to have copies of sburb. Probably Gamzee.
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Mar 10, 2013 04:24
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Midnight Raider posted:He found an Easter Egg, just in time for March! No, you're right and I agree, I guess this is just the line where I personally am starting to have enough. I mean I'm not gonna stop reading or anything it's of a "Really Hussie?  ".I will say I disagree about the Lalonde-fic's and Mindfang's diary, because those actually gave us insight into the teller (Roxy more than Rose, though) for the former and the reader (Vriska) in the latter, propelling it beyond 'cryptic puzzle bullshit'. Like, with Mindfang's diary, sure it was about the Troll ancestors, but it really gave us a lot of insight into Vriska's character by showing us her role model. Even with the Lalonde fics there was some challenge in getting useful information out of it, and Roxy's was actually a really interesting meta-fic on its own. Aranea's tales of cherub and A1 (and Dirk's story of post-Condesce, and Calliope's explanation of the classes) have just been straight up, 'yep, here's the facts' and that's... sort of boring? Dirk's a bit less so because we got his thoughts about things, not just a recap, and Meenah really saved Aranea's info booth, but... I don't know. Doc Scratch's bad ancestor fanfic is similar to this case, but at the time it was the first of the straight info dumps so I at least was willing to let it slide. It also kind of suited his character. Yeah, being overly dry and verbose also suits Aranea (and Dirk, and Calliope), its just more an overload for me at this point. I mean what insight into Aranea do we have from this story? Into Calliope and Caliborn? Not much. We got some of the circumstances behind the cherubs birth, but the actual explanation for why they (and cherubs in general) are so weird is 'because they are' which is unsatisfying to me for some other reasons that I say I won't get into but probably will because I have no life. It's just like, for some reason Hussie doesn't trust either his own ability to write something w/o info dumping (for no good reason, he did an excellent job earlier on) or he doesn't trust us to understand (for... understandable reasons). I mean, up until now the the cherub's situation was a mystery. Why were they so weird? What circumstances led to their imprisonment on the meteor on a crazy Earth? We slowly got a bit more information, one more puzzle piece... and then Aranea comes and just straight up explains a huge chunk of it. It makes me not want to really engage with the work or think about the clues Hussie's left for other big mysteries, try to puzzle things out, because chances are he's just going to carpet bomb us with exposition in the future as well and render all the theorizing even more pointless than it already is.
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Mar 10, 2013 04:31
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Honestly, after an entire act's worth of new questions being raised, constant focus shifts, cryptic hints, and long stretches of characters dicking around, it's really refreshing to finally just get a nice stream of exposition to make sense of it all.
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Mar 10, 2013 04:58
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Mazerunner posted:critiques on exposition I think you're taking it for granted that Aranea is 100% reliable in her telling, both from getting the facts right and from her perspective on it. Plus, there is a helluva lot of foreshadowing going on in the margins of this infodump. -Lord English's crazy rainbow strobe is not related to Sburb, but comes from the very nature of a cherub's being. -The Calliope that predominated is likely to have been one that had it's personality flipped on birth, thus is likely to be as great a villain as LE -the very nature of the cherub's birth is an exception to the ontological paradoxes that Sburb puts on the rest of it's participants and so on.
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Mar 10, 2013 05:00
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lotus circle posted:So...then Caliborn and Calliope aren't paradox clones? This is just confusing, it's been said since Act 3 that every Sburb player is a paradox clone of themselves made of ectoslime. I would say the reason Aranea believes Caliborn and Calliope were never meant to play Sburb is indeed because they aren't paradox clones, but it doesn't quite add up, as they DO both have dreamselves. I'm beginning to think LE will duel with the Beta Calliope, who is also violent like he is, and they end up mating and making the Most Violent Cherub in a "whoever wins, we lose" situation. That would be kinda stupid and grody though. nerdbot fucked around with this message at 05:07 on Mar 10, 2013 |
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Mar 10, 2013 05:04
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A big flaming stink posted:I think you're taking it for granted that Aranea is 100% reliable in her telling, both from getting the facts right and from her perspective on it. Plus, there is a helluva lot of foreshadowing going on in the margins of this infodump. Well, yeah. I mentioned that earlier. It's that at this point we have no reason to think that she's not, considering that all the other Act 6 info dumps have all been correct so far. Dirk was 100% correct about the post-Condesce stuff (although that one worked for me), Aranea just handed out information about the A1 Trolls like candy, Calliope's musings about the classpect stuff might as well have been Hussie talking... So sure, Aranea might be totally wrong and I actually kind of hope she is! but I don't see any reason right now to think she will be. I actually feel kind of hypocritical about this because I've made some posts on the official MSPA forums about being patient and waiting to see how things turn out before making snap judgements and that's exactly the opposite of what I'm doing now, so ugh. HorseRenoir posted:Honestly, after an entire act's worth of new questions being raised, constant focus shifts, cryptic hints, and long stretches of characters dicking around, it's really refreshing to finally just get a nice stream of exposition to make sense of it all. I did agree with you earlier on, like with Dirk's exposition about the Condesce's Earth, like 'whew nice to not have any bullshit', but it was also not really something people were trying to figure out?. In this case (the cherub mystery) things were set up to be an actual puzzle like earlier stuff and having Aranea just explain everything kind of nullifies that, I think at least.
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Mar 10, 2013 05:10
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lotus circle posted:So...then Caliborn and Calliope aren't paradox clones? This is just confusing  .As for the update, the cherub backstory is interesting, but also a lot of info to dump this late in the game. I'm also pretty tired in general of mysterious all-pervading energy fields that are accessed in some vague way. ShardPhoenix fucked around with this message at 06:48 on Mar 10, 2013 |
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Mar 10, 2013 06:46
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Hanks Lust Cafe posted:What's so dumb about it? I think it's neat. Sex was mentioned. Someone cries every time.
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Mar 10, 2013 07:16
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This story is important not because it explains what's going on with Lord English, but rather that it gives us some better context to evaluate him in. Until now, Cherubs in general have been so bizarre and mysterious that we had no way of knowing what exactly made Lord English special. Now we are starting to get an idea. He is special because he is an already strange and powerful race playing a game that can give him more power AND who somehow messed up his own maturation process by killing his sister too early. This is good, I like it a lot.
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Mar 10, 2013 07:24
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ShardPhoenix posted:I'm also pretty tired in general of mysterious all-pervading energy fields that are accessed in some vague way. I can kind of get behind that, but have we had any of those in Homestuck up to this point? The only other thing I can think of that matches those criteria is Homestuck's omnipresent wifi.
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Mar 10, 2013 08:03
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I'll have to side on team "This is stupid." At least the troll romance monologue was self-aware. I laughed throughout that entire bit, but there was no laughing for this update. And this update even had a clown.
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Mar 10, 2013 08:11
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You probably get void sessions when someone who shouldn't be playing sburb, plays sburb. So maybe Gamzee is the one who supplied the Cali's with the game and the drive to play it. Somewhere out there is a god tier gent of piss who is collecting dapper suited felt members.
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Mar 10, 2013 08:20
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Olivia42 posted:I'll have to side on team "This is stupid." At least the troll romance monologue was self-aware. I laughed throughout that entire bit, but there was no laughing for this update. And this update even had a clown. Similar stance here, really. It's not helped by Aranea not being a good storyteller, and while that's sort of the point of her, it doesn't make listening to her any more bearable.
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Mar 10, 2013 08:22
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Color Printer posted:Hey, if the male had won, Caliborn would have been a green son. He became the Red Son instead.  
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Mar 10, 2013 08:48
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Literally Sharks posted:I can kind of get behind that, but have we had any of those in Homestuck up to this point? The only other thing I can think of that matches those criteria is Homestuck's omnipresent wifi.
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Mar 10, 2013 09:00
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ShardPhoenix posted:Yeah, I was more complaining about their presence in sci-fi in general than Homestuck specifically.
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Mar 10, 2013 09:19
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Mazerunner posted:Nope still not liking this. So that the tmblrs don't all go all  on Hussie having a race of demiurges where the males are intrinsically always evil while the females sit atop the lavish pedestal of being intrinsically always good?
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Mar 10, 2013 09:28
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Cat Mattress posted:So that the tmblrs don't all go all It's saying it is switched depending on who wins  Since the female won,the alignments stay the same, with the "daughter" being "good" and the "son" being "evil." If the male won, it would be the other way around, with the son being good and the daughter being evil. At least I think this is what Areana is getting at? Edit: wait you weren't asking, you were explaining I'm dumb.
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Mar 10, 2013 09:40
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I'm thinking the point of this is giving characterization to Lord English and why the whole killed-sister-using-sburb thing hosed him up so humongously and turned him into a monster.
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Mar 10, 2013 09:45
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Cat Mattress posted:So that the tmblrs don't all go all President Ark posted:I'm thinking the point of this is giving characterization to Lord English and why the whole killed-sister-using-sburb thing hosed him up so humongously and turned him into a monster. Also, those two lines you're ranting about there open up the possibility of our mysterious alterna-Calliope having come from a timeline where the male won. And leave open the question of whether green and red are tied to alignment, gender, or neither of the above--which means that that alternate Calliope, in addition to being physically identical to Caliborn (and thus Lord English), would also have red blood like Caliborn (and thus Lord English). Unless you don't give a poo poo about any of that. ... but I think that if you're really certain that you don't give the tiniest fraction of a poo poo about learning anything at all about the motives, plot elements, life, or nature of the primary antagonist of the entire story, the rest of Homestuck probably just isn't for you and you should probably stop reading and also stop complaining about it.
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Mar 10, 2013 09:55
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I think the little detail about what cherub genders are was really neat. In a story with so much duality, it's interesting what the dualities are. Calliope/Caliborn are good/evil, but not because they're female/male. That's arbitrary. But male/female does heave a meaning: stasis/inversion. That's not the first time there's been a stasis/inversion dichotomy. While all the alpha kids are related to a pair of beta kids, Jade and Jake are gender swapped relative to their ancestor's roles, and Roxy and Dirk are not. So does that mean Jane is more powerful than Jake while Dirk is more powerful than Roxy? (Edit: Or should this be the other way around? I confused myself.) No. No it does not mean that, but the concept adds another layer of meaning and symbolism to view the past story through and play with in the future. Also of note in the update was the conclusion of the final battle of Homestuck telegraphed so obviously that it has to be a fakeout... but one that will really happen because everyone knows it won't: quote:Due to his indomita8le nature, I 8elieve victory over his sister was a foregone conclusion. 8arring a highly impro8a8le glitch in causality, it would 8e almost impossi8le for her to predomin8te over someone like him. Eiba fucked around with this message at 10:08 on Mar 10, 2013 |
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Mar 10, 2013 10:05
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I want to know when caliborn's dream self is going to appear and become relevant - after all, as far as we know it's still just snoozing on Derse, unable to wake up again because Caliborn never sleeps. It's been awake in the past because it bribed jack noir into knifing calliope, so he's already had his awakening. if someone went to derse and yarn bonked his dream self, his waking self would fall unconscious - who knows, ghost calliope might be able to jump back inside his head and grab the wheel.
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Mar 10, 2013 10:15
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Highly improbable? If there's a case where luck matters, maybe something besides exposition will come out of this ghost army.
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Mar 10, 2013 10:25
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Wow, now that we know that cherub siblings serve as a model for romance, Caliborn's Freudian slips about his sister (like "mating" her) make a lot more sense. Also, does this Aranea posted:They grow to detest one another, and develop a view of social interaction centered entirely around animosity and confront8tion. For good cheru8s, this readies them for a long life of isol8tion, as they will prefer to avoid the sort of conflict that comes with social interaction as they have 8een conditioned to understand it. 8ut for evil ones, the contentious up8ringing only serves to fuel their inclin8tion to harm others.
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Mar 10, 2013 10:31
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Hanks Lust Cafe posted:What's so dumb about it? I think it's neat. It would be neat if not for this solar serpent part.
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Mar 10, 2013 12:15
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I can't wait until this infodump ends and we see that Meenah stole Aranea's wallet and jumped ship while she was talking.
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Mar 10, 2013 13:16
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Call Now posted:It would be neat if not for this solar serpent part. That's the only neat thing about the whole deal as far as I'm concerned. But I hate straight up info dumps.
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Mar 10, 2013 13:59
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Call Now posted:It would be neat if not for this solar serpent part. I like the solar serpents. It's very ancient mythos-ish. Rooreelooo posted:I want to know when caliborn's dream self is going to appear and become relevant - after all, as far as we know it's still just snoozing on Derse, unable to wake up again because Caliborn never sleeps. It's been awake in the past because it bribed jack noir into knifing calliope, so he's already had his awakening. I was going to say it's a good thing that nobody would kiss Caliborn to let him survive as his dreamself if his realself was killed, but then I remembered Gamzee probably would if it suited his mysterious clown purposes. 
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Mar 10, 2013 14:35
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I'm pretty OK with all this. Though I hope we get clarification on which universe(s) this is taking part in... just where did Gcat put Earth, and how? Cherubs were always special, but is there really nothing cyclical about the two we just saw (meaning, they were just some random cherubs)? Was it an "accident" that Caliborn was able to play Sburb in the first place? Lots of places to touch upon from here on.
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Mar 10, 2013 14:41
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