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Mystic Mongol posted:If you put it that way, it suggests that declaring all fan trolls canon was very empowering of Hussie. Possibly but being from Hussie I bet those who would be best served with that empowerment simply dismissed that as a joke or semi-joke while those who took it to heart are the same who refuse to listen to any constructive criticism. I like to balance my naive belief in the potential of everyone with a nice dose of cynicism.
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Apr 5, 2014 23:14
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Homestuck is young adult fiction, an important part of which genre is the ease with which a reader can project their feelings, concerns, sense of identity, etc. into it, and Homestuck very intentionally makes that particularly easy. For people who have only recently become aware of the existence of society and their relationship to it, fake worlds (including fiction, but also including, just to give an example, high school) are a useful and safe place for them to explore that idea. We grown-rear end adults don't get to use that excuse, though.
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Apr 5, 2014 23:32
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Who What Now posted:He just signed it, he didn't draw that. Perhaps you missed where he wrote "CANON" on the drawing.
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Apr 6, 2014 03:32
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Plom Bar posted:Perhaps you missed where he wrote "CANON" on the drawing. He clearly meant to write "CANNONS".
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Apr 6, 2014 04:10
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Honestly, does anyone like the Alpha Kids more than they like the trolls? Either as characters or from a story stand point?
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Apr 6, 2014 04:54
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Space Cadet Omoly posted:Honestly, does anyone like the Alpha Kids more than they like the trolls? Either as characters or from a story stand point?
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Apr 6, 2014 04:56
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AriadneThread posted:Do you remember high school politics No
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Apr 6, 2014 04:56
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I like Dave but it's mostly because my personal attachment to him requires me to.  I think the whole Hivebent thing, for me, was a big wake up call that told me the story was not really gonna be about the four main kids, which felt a little offputting at the time! CJacobs fucked around with this message at 05:10 on Apr 6, 2014 |
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Apr 6, 2014 05:08
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Space Cadet Omoly posted:Honestly, does anyone like the Alpha Kids more than they like the trolls? Either as characters or from a story stand point? I like them when they do things. Doing things is not really in their nature, so it is growth when it happens.
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Apr 6, 2014 05:21
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Bless you
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Apr 6, 2014 05:24
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Space Cadet Omoly posted:Honestly, does anyone like the Alpha Kids more than they like the trolls? Either as characters or from a story stand point? Yes. From a story standpoint they're much more meaningful than the trolls, since they're supposed to help bring closure to the main characters' own development arcs by giving them a second chance to get to know their guardians. The early part of Homestuck invested quite a lot into the relationships each kid had with their guardian, and their deaths seemed to cut off that avenue before it could come to fruition. The Alpha kids have a strong narrative niche as a result. The trolls are actually the problem, because they take up all the time and attention that could've been used on the alpha kids. We may not like the alpha kids much now, but that's at least partly because they came in so late into the story and after we just did a big cycle of introductions with the trolls and finished integrating them into the story proper. The pacing was all hosed, so the alpha kids became this big anchor around the story's neck. The trolls themselves would've been better served by being their own, actually separate side-story anyway. Hivebent was at once too long and too truncated.
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Apr 6, 2014 07:35
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life_source posted:2) Romance in a way that makes sense (to people with broken heads) It's literally just the concept of soul mates, but also applied to an idealised nemesis, BFFs, and that one person in every geek social group who's constantly trying to hold it all together in spite of the fact that everyone they know is completely horrible. (Also if you don't find one of the first two before you're thirty you'll be euthanised because this is sea-hitler's water apocalypse we're talking about, though unsurprisingly most fans seem to gloss over that bit) AriadneThread posted:Do you remember high school politics Yes, and every day I'm thankful that none of mine was preserved forever in the annals of the internet. Christ, the things I bought in to 
Renaissance Robot fucked around with this message at 15:06 on Apr 6, 2014 |
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Apr 6, 2014 15:03
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troll romance is popular because it provides an archetypal framework that encapsulates the poo poo that obsessive nerds go nuts about since the dawn of fandom much like sonic and trolls provide a madlibs style create-your-character, the quadrants provide a zero effort fill-in-the-blank method of describing social relations also karkat's character arc is literally the best part of homestuck so i would question the taste of someone who would do away with act 5-1 entirely
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Apr 6, 2014 18:47
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Nate RFB posted:Roxy? Sure. But that's not saying much because Roxy is better than everyone. This forever. Personally I think that Homestuck would really be missing something without Hivebent. The disjointed nature of the narrative overall, the side stories, abrupt changes of focus, introduction of new characters, abandonment of characters, etc. are part of the entire experience.
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Apr 6, 2014 19:07
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I really enjoyed Act 5. The chatlog where Karkat tries to tell Dave and John to stop hitting on Terezi and Vriska is the best log in Homestuck. Also Vriska happens to be Best Character. There isn't a Roxy Time or Karkat Time or Dave Time, is there? well dave time I GUESS
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Apr 7, 2014 01:41
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WAR FOOT posted:I really enjoyed Act 5. The chatlog where Karkat tries to tell Dave and John to stop hitting on Terezi and Vriska is the best log in Homestuck. Maybe my memory's foggy with old age and gin, but I don't think Vriska Time was usually something widely enjoyed or celebrated.
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Apr 7, 2014 04:24
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Dolash posted:Maybe my memory's foggy with old age and gin, but I don't think Vriska Time was usually something widely enjoyed or celebrated. It was hilarious, actually. I mean, maybe not if you participated, but who would do something as silly as that?
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Apr 7, 2014 04:45
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Vriskatime is the spectator sport of ages, especially when people think she's a villain instead of just misguided.
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Apr 7, 2014 05:06
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Dolash posted:Maybe my memory's foggy with old age and gin, but I don't think Vriska Time was usually something widely enjoyed or celebrated. Definitely the gin.
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Apr 7, 2014 05:49
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Man, you know what, it's been so long I think I might even enjoy a good old Vriskatime, just for old time's sake. Remember arguing about whether what she did with the beta ghosts in the dream bubbles was a necessary evil or not? Or how about her justifying creating Bec Noir by saying that hey, somebody had to do it, why not her? Did she kill Tavros in self-defence? Heck, we could go back to the beginning and relive the hyperventilating that mind-controlling poor, sweet Tavros off a cliff provoked.
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Apr 7, 2014 06:42
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She was just trying to help Pupa Pan to fly!
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Apr 7, 2014 07:02
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Apr 7, 2014 08:21
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Yes, only the
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Apr 7, 2014 08:30
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Vriska is only my second least favorite Serket.
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Apr 7, 2014 09:26
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Are we counting hypothetical Vriskas who actually learn their lesson at some point, (and paradox space screws over anyway,) or is being a huge bluh bluh forever just assumed to be a universal constant for her? (It turns out that being awful was always the right thing to do because paradox space already decided that it was. Thus, crippling Tavros and then murdering him and then doublekilling countless alternates and then diverting attention from the Viceroy's very important and exciting side story were all actually the moral and right thing to do.)
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Apr 7, 2014 15:32
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My issue with Vriska is that it feels like her storyline went nowhere, really. That's probably the fault of the dreambubble stuff--it had tied up neatly with her death but then kept going. Actually, have we really had much of anything come out of the dreambubbles? It feels like a lot of filler.
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Apr 7, 2014 16:02
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WAR FOOT posted:Yes, only the
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Apr 7, 2014 16:02
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drat, y'all got tricked into vriskachat again!
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Apr 7, 2014 16:05
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We don't ever see alt-timeline Vriska's, right? Not in the ghost army and not really anywhere. Strange, but I guess a good thing. All those Vriska's and their machinations. Not to mention the combined mass causing black holes pretty much everywhere.
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Apr 7, 2014 16:20
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Makaris posted:We don't ever see alt-timeline Vriska's, right? Not in the ghost army and not really anywhere. Strange, but I guess a good thing. All those Vriska's and their machinations. Not to mention the combined mass causing black holes pretty much everywhere. A worthy question: if Vriska really believed her rationalization that it was okay to mass-mind-control and sacrifice beta-timeline trolls because "they're not real people" or whatever, why didn't her army contain any alternate versions of herself? Are beta Vriskas real people by her estimation?
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Apr 7, 2014 16:24
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Makaris posted:We don't ever see alt-timeline Vriska's, right?
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Apr 7, 2014 16:42
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It only contained trolls that were especially susceptible to her (and Aranea's) mind control powers. And also lots of Ampora's because they are sad sacks that naturally join any large group.
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Apr 7, 2014 16:44
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aegof posted:(It turns out that being awful was always the right thing to do because paradox space already decided that it was. Thus, crippling Tavros and then murdering him and then doublekilling countless alternates and then diverting attention from the Viceroy's very important and exciting side story were all actually the moral and right thing to do.) I'll always remember when Dave tried to use this argument to defend not telling Jade he was going to die, and Rose pointed out how convenient it is that the things he "has" to do for the timeline happen to be the things he's okay with doing. In general, people in Homestuck only have to do things to keep the alpha timeline stable if they're susceptible to that argument - Aradia will do anything and everything because she's a fatalist, so she gets lots of weird situations she has to do regardless of her thoughts on the matter, while John would never accept "because the timeline says so" as a reason to do something he doesn't agree with so he never gets into that situation. We saw a bit more of this when Terezi thought about how she saw only two outcomes when she confronted Vriska, but acknowledged she was using that as an excuse to rationalize her actions when there might've been other possibilities she had not considered. As such, all the bad stuff Vriska does because she "has to" or else they'd split into a beta timeline is still bad stuff she's responsible for. The alternative is a completely fatalistic and deterministic universe where no one, not even Lord English and Bec Noir, are morally responsible for their actions. The Lord of Hats posted:My issue with Vriska is that it feels like her storyline went nowhere, really. That's probably the fault of the dreambubble stuff--it had tied up neatly with her death but then kept going. This is pretty much the whole problem with the dream bubbles and with a lot of Act 6. We'd all started agreeing the outcome of the meteor made sense and everyone's narratives were tied up nicely (with little character epilogues like Vriska meeting Beta-John), and then they awkwardly stumble back into the story.
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Apr 7, 2014 17:48
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Makes perfect sense from a character standpoint that Vriska would get pissed off and belligerent in the afterlife, tbh.
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Apr 7, 2014 20:10
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Dolash posted:This is pretty much the whole problem with the dream bubbles and with a lot of Act 6. We'd all started agreeing the outcome of the meteor made sense and everyone's narratives were tied up nicely (with little character epilogues like Vriska meeting Beta-John), and then they awkwardly stumble back into the story. Yeah, with hindsight... I think it would have been better if 90% of the dreambubble stuff was cut. Things worth keeping: - Calliope's interaction with various living characters, which gives her character a purpose and a goal. - Establishing Meenah's personality as a back-door to understanding the personality of the Condesce. Almost everything else (Aranea and her scheme, the hunt for Lord English's treasure, the rest of the A1 trolls) could be cut without it affecting much. Now, there's still ways to salvage this: - Have a mass-attack of the dreambubble trolls and alt-selves on Lord English play a key role in the final battle. Have the complete and total destruction of said dreambubbles act as both a resolution to the A1 trolls and as a sign that things are actually moving on, instead of the endless spiral the characters are mired in. - Have John's history-altering treasure find actually do something important, like stopping Caliborn from becoming Lord English in the first place. - Vriska needs to do something really important and completely self-sacrificing. Despite how entertaining the character is, I don't think there's any way she's coming out of this. The only way to end her arc on a satisfactory note is for her to finally 'get it' and have her do something that is unambiguously for others, and not just a 'I say I'm doing this for everyone, but it also makes me look awesome' scheme. Maybe after that, completely out of her control, she actually does get saved somehow, since this is actually a fairly optimistic story in the long-view, but it can't be by her control.
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Apr 7, 2014 20:40
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The last time we saw Vriska it seemed like she was letting go of the need to grab all the attention and be the hero, so doing some kind of Ultimate Sacrifice thing might not be the best resolution to that. Doing something purely supportive or cooperative might work though. As for all the other dead trolls, no idea. They could just get erased right before the final battle to show how terrible the situation's gotten, but they've kind of been dead a long time and killing them again now wouldn't have much punch. Bringing them back to help contribute in the final battle in some small way makes sense. It's really hard to tell how the story will end though, so we might have all the trolls alive again somehow, or all passing on to whatever comes after the dream bubbles, or whatever. I would enjoy it a lot if the Tavros/Sollux/Feferi/Nepeta crew were to survive to the end, maybe doing one last unexpectedly important thing in the final battle. Revenge of the minor characters! Might as well, what with how the dream bubbles have been used so far.
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Apr 7, 2014 22:19
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At this point I don't really care how it ends as long as it does.
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Apr 7, 2014 22:27
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The real problem with Vriska's reappearance in the dream bubbles has nothing to do with the dream bubbles; it's actually the fact that Hussie didn't let Vriska's character development stick. After that, I doubt this last bit of introspection will make a difference. Either Vriska's unwillingness to change based on her introspection is an intentional character flaw (which is likely, to be fair), or Hussie is unwilling to let any character meaningfully change (which is even more likely.) It'll be interesting to see where Hussie brings the ending, when it hits.
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Apr 7, 2014 22:40
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King of Solomon posted:The real problem with Vriska's reappearance in the dream bubbles has nothing to do with the dream bubbles; it's actually the fact that Hussie didn't let Vriska's character development stick. After that, I doubt this last bit of introspection will make a difference. Plenty of characters have changed. The original four kids are quite different than when we first met them. Even Vriska's changed, she's just had so many false starts it's hard to trust any new development. That last one seemed like it had some promise, though, because she was seeing another Serket in action and gaining some useful perspective. Sort of a "geeze, is that what I look like to other people?" moment. A lot still rests on the finale though, yeah. Just about nobody's reached the end of their arc, at least not successfully.
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Apr 7, 2014 22:57
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Bobulus posted:Almost everything else (Aranea and her scheme, the hunt for Lord English's treasure, the rest of the A1 trolls) could be cut without it affecting much. You can't really make a call on how important Aranea is when she's only just started doing anything.
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