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Expect to get really loving tired of Jake and Dirk and wish it was just Roxytime all the time. Jane's pretty okay, though. She makes every conversation she's in better.
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Dec 16, 2013 09:03
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SatansBestBuddy posted:Jade is also pretty cool. She gets second place in the Best Character category. 
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Dec 16, 2013 10:10
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With the benefit of hindsight provided by this extended hiatus, I have begun to realize that maybe Homestuck isn't very good. Certainly, the pacing is atrocious in the extreme, and as I go back to read over earlier sections I find the extended chatlog presentation cumbersome once the obnoxious typing quirks are introduced. The inconsistent visual style is also jarring, and it's use of diction is at times impenetrably obtuse (kind of like this sentence). All this is a pity, because underneath it are some really endearing characters and heartwarming stories. I'm ready for it to end. And then I'm going to play Namco High and hopefully laugh my butt off.
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Dec 16, 2013 11:55
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Dirk and Jake are probably the least interesting kids. All the others are unique and interesting in a way or another, while the former is a more down-to-earth, sexually repressed Rose and the latter is Act 2 John in the fifties. They needed more time to become as developped as the others, in my opinion. I'm not sure why the Alpha girls didn't suffer in the same way. Maybe their issues are easier to understand and connect with; maybe they are just more naturally likeable. e: When I say "the least interesting" I don't mean that they aren't good characters. They just aren't on the same level of some of the others. paradoxGentleman fucked around with this message at 17:17 on Dec 16, 2013 |
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Dec 16, 2013 13:09
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Dirk suffered a LOT from the fact that, early on, Bro was probably the most outrageously badass side character and it's pretty hard to write a non-infuriating personality for that.
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Dec 16, 2013 13:37
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paradoxGentleman posted:Dirk and Jake are probably the least interesting kids. All the others are unique and interesting in a way or another, while the former is a more down-to-earth, sexually repressed Rose and the latter is Act 2 John in the fifties. They needed more time to become as developped as the others, in my opinion. I would put forth that Jane is only slightly better, and then mostly just because of how much attention the comic put on her. If Jane wasn't the "main character" of the beta kids, she'd be just as boring as Dirk and Jake. Roxy works because her character is actually fun. The others are so bogged down in uninteresting relationship drama that it's just a slog to read through.
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Dec 16, 2013 14:50
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Eox posted:Dirk suffered a LOT from the fact that, early on, Bro was probably the most outrageously badass side character and it's pretty hard to write a non-infuriating personality for that. Dirk also got tiresome fast because he's a) one of the main exposition engines for the first half of act 6, and b) literally a quarter of the act 6 cast between AR and his various splinter-selves, so he hogs a ton of spotlight. He got better in the second half, when he actually developed some personality beyond "dry ironic guy," but it was too late by then.
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Dec 16, 2013 15:54
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Dirk is flawed, but at least he's not as aggressively boring as Jane and Jake.
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Dec 16, 2013 15:56
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Dirk is manipulative and selfish, but without the development or charisma that made Vriska a good character. It doesn't help that his Thing is meta-irony, which just makes him come off as obnoxious when he out-Daves Dave. Jake is a milquetoast who is basically overwhelmed by everything and tries to hide it behind false bravado. He'd be pitiable if his forced old-timey speech wasn't so damned annoying. Jane is the most "normal", but that also make her kinda boring. She handles the bullshit heaped upon her better than Jake, but not by much. She has the best reaction shots though. Roxy is best at everything other than reaction shots. And not just in comparison to the other alpha kids; she really is great. Then Meenah shows up and you wish she and Roxy were the only alpha kids.
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Dec 16, 2013 15:57
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Another thing with Roxy is that she started with a character gimmick that was initially very funny but would probably start to grate with time (the drunken typos) and then had character growth away from that (sobering up, learning to cope with the dumb relationship tetrahedron she'd been lumbered with) before it actually did start to grate.
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Dec 16, 2013 16:06
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Thundarr posted:Then Meenah shows up and you wish she and Roxy were the only alpha kids. This would have redeemed Chapter 6.
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Dec 16, 2013 16:08
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Remember that window of time before all the alpha kids were introduced, when the Internet was full of speculation regarding what their personalities would be like, what their names were, etc? I think I liked the fan-concept of Kidbro being this excitable fanboy weeaboo type without an ounce of irony in his system considerably more than the Dirk we ended up with. Being an insufferable selfish smug jerk seems to be part of Dirk's character development (see: the conversation with AR about getting to see what it's like for other people who have to put up with his bullshit all the time) but that sure doesn't make it any less obnoxious to read. e: Also, like Paul.Power said, the development didn't happen in a reasonable timeframe like Roxy's did.
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Dec 16, 2013 16:10
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I'll go to bat for Dirk. Dirk is really interesting to me for a couple of reasons: - He's a pretty transparent stand-in for the author . When he talks about irony, when he's dealing with Caliborn's demands for pornography... I suspect he's repeating Hussie's own ideas about his creation verbatim. - Dirk is a badass, as you'd expect an author's Mary Sue stand-in character to be... but he's also a huge rear end in a top hat. He's manipulative, self-absorbed and emotionally stunted. These are not traits you expect to see in a character who otherwise resembles the author so closely. - Dirk is gay, and he's pretty much the first gay male character Homestuck has taken seriously. Despite the Trolls supposedly being bisexual, whenever one of them was interested in a guy (Gamzee, Karkat, Eridan) it was always a punchline. Homestuck isn't afraid to make Dirk look like a jackass but it also treats him, and his sexuality, with respect. And on top of all of that, it's pretty interesting for a heterosexual male author to write a super-competent Mary Sue stand-in for himself who, instead of being a ladies' man, turns out to be gay. So yeah, I think the tension between those different aspects of the character (author stand-in, jerk, gay guy) make Dirk pretty interesting. He's not the most likable character in the story... though I have some sympathy for him as a lonely, hosed-up teenager who keeps making dumb choices. That's also why, while Roxy is likable and is a lot of fun to read about, I don't find her especially interesting. She's basically a checklist of sympathetic character traits: funny, humble, honest, selfless, etc. She's like a drunk female Peter Parker. Jane Crocker will always have a special place in my heart for this sequence, because that poo poo happened to me verbatim in high school. A girl I liked came up and straight-up asked me out, and I was so flustered I botched it completely and turned her down. I thought it was funny when that bit was first published, and a lot of people assumed Jane was being mind-controlled... nope, she's just being a teenager.
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Dec 16, 2013 16:12
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The interesting thing about Dirk, in my opinion, was the emotional breakdown he had with AR up on that rooftop. Dude basically hates himself, which is even more of a problem for him than it would be for most people.
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Dec 16, 2013 16:28
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Indie Rocktopus posted:Jane Crocker will always have a special place in my heart for this sequence, because that poo poo happened to me verbatim in high school. A girl I liked came up and straight-up asked me out, and I was so flustered I botched it completely and turned her down. I thought it was funny when that bit was first published, and a lot of people assumed Jane was being mind-controlled... nope, she's just being a teenager. This 100%. Come on, we were all nerdy teenagers once who engaged in inexplicable self-sabotage out of fear. That was a very well-done sequence. Bobulus posted:The interesting thing about Dirk, in my opinion, was the emotional breakdown he had with AR up on that rooftop. Dude basically hates himself, which is even more of a problem for him than it would be for most people. I wanted to find a way to work this into my previous post but couldn't -- I get that the basic point of the multiple Dirks is an exploration of self-loathing (it's the character development I mentioned), but I find self-loathing kind of tiresome to read about.  e: I mean, it's already been thoroughly explored in this work anyway, by Karkat in Act 5. We already have one of these arcs. loquacius fucked around with this message at 16:56 on Dec 16, 2013 |
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Dec 16, 2013 16:31
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I'm generally pretty positive about act 6, but even I'll say that a major weakness of it is that its characters seem built to be foils to original four kids, with whom they still have yet to interact substantially (with one notable exception). The first quartet had four acts of learning the rules of the story, then act 5 saw them bouncing off a dozen new personalities. Act 6 had its fair share of entirely new character dynamics, but the second quartet were basically excluded from them; they went through the longest act of the story having virtually nobody to talk to except each other, and they had less new information to reveal during that time. (Indeed, a great deal of exposition was delivered through Jake talking to himself, which stopped telling us anything new about Jake after like three pages.) They've all had some great moments, but they spun their wheels a lot in getting to them, and the best are very conspicuously and frustratingly yet to come. So they ended up revealing less of their personalities - except, of course, for the most outgoing one who conversed the most with outsiders. Anyway, by now it's been literally two years since their introduction, during which time the obligatory solo introductions gave way to the new characters doing the same thing as the audience - literally waiting for the rest of the cast to arrive so they can do stuff together. When that actually started to happen, this thread thought it was another fakeout, and then it was interrupted by a villain, and then the Gigapause began.
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Dec 16, 2013 16:51
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loquacius posted:I wanted to find a way to work this into my previous post but couldn't -- I get that the basic point of the multiple Dirks is an exploration of self-loathing (it's the character development I mentioned), but I find self-loathing kind of tiresome to read about. Probably because self-loathing is super tiresome. The thing that most starkly highlights what a load of irrational horseshit it is is an outside perspective, which we automatically have due to the format of the story laying out not only every factual aspect of this character but also the ways in which other characters see him. So when he proceeds to  about what a terrible person he is, it's like, god just shut the gently caress up and maybe believe your friends when they tell you you're good enough, geeze.
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Dec 16, 2013 17:19
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Still, I don't want to say thay tha Alpha are BAD characters, per se. They just weren't given enough room to grow, and for us to grow fon of them. If you read the first part of Homestuck John seems little more than your generic naive hero-nerd, and look how far he got. ...okay, so the reader suggestions are partially responsible for that. My point still stands. e: Bongo Bill, you bring up a good point, actually. It would be very interesting to see the interactions between these two groups. It would also be amazing. I hope we get to see lots of that in the final update. paradoxGentleman fucked around with this message at 17:35 on Dec 16, 2013 |
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Dec 16, 2013 17:28
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Indie Rocktopus posted:I'll go to bat for Dirk. Dirk is really interesting to me for a couple of reasons: This is actually the truth. The Huss views the pornographic subculture of Homestuck as weird despite having gone to extreme lengths to explain how trolls reproduce (even though that was for the purposes of one large joke after all is said and done). In his own words (paraphrased a bit), "it's gross, because they're y'know, just kids." And really I can't blame him for thinking that way because it's one thing to like the comic but it's really another to draw porn of it.
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Dec 16, 2013 17:34
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CJacobs posted:This is actually the truth. The Huss views the pornography of Homestuck as weird despite having gone to extreme lengths to explain how trolls reproduce (even though that was for the purposes of one large joke after all is said and done). In his own words (paraphrased a bit), "it's gross, because they're y'know, just kids." When has this ever stopped anyone?
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Dec 16, 2013 17:35
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paradoxGentleman posted:When has this ever stopped anyone? Oh I didn't say it has, I was just affirming that the Dirk's-an-author-avatar theory is correct, at least on that front.
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Dec 16, 2013 17:35
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The Alpha kids would have been FAR more enjoyable if they weren't presented to us in a vacuum for so long. The audience had been introduced to and taken through the John/Nanna Rose/Mom Dave/Bro Jade/Grandpa dynamics throughout acts 1-5 and part of the promise that the cascade seemed to offer was that those would be tied back into with the main characters being able to reconcile with these seemingly distant guardian figures who were actually constantly acting in their best interests. Instead what we got was 2 years of the main characters sitting around in space while the beta kids just had drama among one another, something I'm not sure anyone really wanted.
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Dec 16, 2013 17:36
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Teenagers with relationship issues are insufferable to read. That's, like, 90% of why Act 6 sucks. The way to fix this is to not introduce the Alpha kids in a bubble like they were. Have Jade and John crash land on Jane's house the very next page after Cascade. Flashback to before Jane started the game if you really, really need to let people know how it happened. And have her be 13 instead of 16, I honestly don't get why Hussie aged them up like that, and I get even less why he needed the original kids to also age up to 16, and did so by having them trapped in their own bubbles for three years. I guess he.... wanted to write relationship drama? And it'd be weird if they were 13? Just... just don't write relationship drama. Write relationships first. Having everybody trapped in their respective bubbles, only interacting via the internet or not interacting at all, worked well at the start of Homestuck when everything was just getting started. Doesn't work so well when all those bubbles had been burst for a while and they're supposed to be interacting in person but instead he created new bubbles with even stricter communication limits and they were stuck in those for even longer and it was just months and months of backpedaling away from progress and ARRRGH SatansBestBuddy fucked around with this message at 17:48 on Dec 16, 2013 |
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Dec 16, 2013 17:45
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Goddamnit I just reread the JohnRoxy conversation. John is so loving nice. "she's just a nice nerd who likes to read and knit" after Rose was all scared to meet her mother and he is trying to smooth things over, oh my God. Why do people believe that John is just a doofus? Boy's got enough empathy for all of Alternia.
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Dec 16, 2013 17:52
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If you think that the porn of Homestuck is bad, it could have been very much worse, because consider this: Homestuck ORIGINALLY started on April 10th instead of April 13th those many years ago, back when the Huss thought doing the whole drat thing in flash would be at all feasible. The reason John and the rest of the kids are around 13 is because that's the day of the month that it began; he was 10 in the original comic for the same reason. 
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Dec 16, 2013 17:58
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paradoxGentleman posted:Goddamnit I just reread the JohnRoxy conversation. Jake is just a doofus (to put it as charitably as possible). John is a Rad Dude.
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Dec 16, 2013 18:02
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SatansBestBuddy posted:Teenagers with relationship issues are insufferable to read. That's, like, 90% of why Act 6 sucks. Teenagers with relationship issues can be just fine, just don't do it for a million pages straight. Gunnerkrigg Court is fantastic at portraying teenagers who do stupid poo poo without knowing why because they're teenagers and that's just what they do. They question themselves, they sometimes hate themselves, they act out against their friends meaninglessly, they sabotage themselves because they don't understand pretty much anything - and it never gets tiring because it's extraordinarily well written and it's not just going on forever. You also need actual pacing. Cascade ended with the loving curtains being torn and ripped up and EVERYTHING IS ON FIRE, and then...nothing. One big stop sign. It's not that we didn't have time to watch them grow - we had two years to watch them grow. It's that they didn't grow! As cool as Roxy and Meenah and HIC are, I think the comic would be better without them if it meant ditching Act 6. It ruined the comic's pacing. And it ruined it with the most banal poo poo. I'm sure Dirk is a super intricate character if you really examine him but oh my god I do not care, almost every panel with him is excruciating. No, Dirk is not interesting, because I find it impossible to be interested in him. It's the same with Jake. John is a doofus but he's a loveable doofus who cares about his friends and tries to be friendly to everyone and is generally the merry sometimes trickster he likes to think he is. Jake is just dumb. That's his character trait. He's just always dumb about everything. He's "doofus" with nothing else tacked on. He doesn't add anything to the story through his character - he's basically a macguffin for other characters to fight over. Hell, he isn't a character, he's just a walking plot point. And you got to have all this right after the big climactic scene where all the plot points start to weave together for a big finale, oh wait now the plot points are being scattered everywhere again by some kids nobody cares about.
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Dec 16, 2013 18:15
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ProfessorCirno posted:Jake is just dumb. That's his character trait. He's just always dumb about everything. He's "doofus" with nothing else tacked on. He doesn't add anything to the story through his character - he's basically a macguffin for other characters to fight over. Hell, he isn't a character, he's just a walking plot point. I still stand by the "Jake is the Token Girl character from every pre-2000 comic book or cartoon series, but a dude" theory, because being satire gives Jake a reason to exist. 
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Dec 16, 2013 18:20
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loquacius posted:I still stand by the "Jake is the Token Girl character from every pre-2000 comic book or cartoon series, but a dude" theory, because being satire gives Jake a reason to exist. This stopped being a theory and became fact as soon as he cinched on the Lara Croft holsters, in my mind. He's also twisting the ditzy-trophy-girl thing on it's head by appearing to have legitimate cognitive impairment (likely from all the severe blows to the head he takes) that everyone seems oblivious to.
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Dec 16, 2013 18:46
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Angry Walrus posted:Probably just decided to wait for the last page of Homestuck for them to smooch. The last page of homestuck: everyone dies, then they smooch, then they all get revived. nobody dies and everyone is shipped forever.
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Dec 16, 2013 19:08
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Honestly if Act 6 had been completely rewritten so that it wasn't completely horrible I shudder to think at how big and unwieldy the ~Homestuck Fandom~ would've been. It seems like the way it's been done killed the momentum of the comic almost completely.
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Dec 16, 2013 19:31
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I don't think Act 6 has been "terrible" except for the random Jake poo poo. They managed to condense the "oh poo poo what about all the other trolls that could exist?!?" into 3 mostly fun flash walkabouts, instead of a billion pages of chatlogs. But maybe it just doesn't look like crap in comparison to the gigantic tumorgreen sun of Act 5. As for creating something that the fandom wouldn't turn into something horrible? Who loving knows if that's possible when you're a popular piece of media with tweens.
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Dec 16, 2013 19:43
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ProfessorCirno posted:No no, I mean, Karkat is fantastic on accident. HIS accident, not Hussie's. Everything he does is hilarious and all in ways he wishes weren't. Which makes it kinda funnier really. Not arguing that Karkat is the best, but would you please elaborate? I mean, you don't think he's intentionally written like that?
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Dec 16, 2013 20:10
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Blackheart posted:Not arguing that Karkat is the best, but would you please elaborate? I mean, you don't think he's intentionally written like that? I took it to mean that he's intentionally written to be accidentally amusing? In that, Karkat as a character believes himself to be pretty serious but all he's doing is throwing hilarious tantrums.
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Dec 16, 2013 20:16
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My favorite Karkat moment is that one scene where he's just sadly talking to himself about Troll Christmas.
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Dec 16, 2013 20:18
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David Copperfield posted:The last page of homestuck: everyone dies, then they smooch, then they all get revived. nobody dies and everyone is shipped forever. The very next ==> we get will just be a hyperlink leading to tumblr.
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Dec 16, 2013 21:56
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Talking the ending of Homestuck though, I have no loving idea how this comic could come to a conclusion. I haven't followed it for a while but this thread's sudden appearance in Games piqued my curiosity and man this poo poo is more convoluted than it was when I lost interest in it!David Copperfield posted:The last page of homestuck: everyone dies, then they smooch, then they all get revived. nobody dies and everyone is shipped forever. This is what I think is gonna happen but unironically.
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Dec 16, 2013 22:13
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CJacobs posted:This is what I think is gonna happen but unironically. I feel ashamed about it but sometimes I want a super indulgently happy ending. Also the best Karkat moment is yelling at a chair.
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Dec 16, 2013 22:17
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Hussie has done a lot of pointing and laughing at traditional story and hero clichés/templates in later acts, so it's not unreasonable he'd subvert it again and go back to a more traditional but suitably Hussie-esque ending with a clear victory. I'm going to point to Brain!Dirk's emphatic "Jake believes in me" as a sign so this doesn't look like totally unfounded conjecture. Best Karkat moment is when Sollux is telling him not to run a virus and Karkat runs it anyway because he's a stubborn little twat.
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Dec 16, 2013 22:31
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The epilogue of Problem Sleuth was fantastic, so I'm not worried about the ending.
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Dec 16, 2013 22:34
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