|
I dunno, I skipped the recaps on PS while reading it live and I never had trouble following it.
|
#
?
Nov 2, 2016 23:03
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 26, 2024 23:36 |
|
|
Arsenic Lupin posted:Yes, but that's the *point*. The long conversation with Dirk on the lily pads lets Dave decide that he can do heroic things, because alternate Dave did. That's a crucial moment for Dave's character arc, which unlike most of the characters he does have. It depends on if you think that is an earnt conclusion, though? Dave had already agreed to go along with Vriska's fightplan prior to his rooftop feelings jam with Dirk. It's justifying the acceptance after the fact. I personally didn't feel said chat with Dirk did a great job at resolving things, either. It felt like a rushed 'We're all splinters of the same character!' The lilipad scene onwards feels like a breakneck rush to try and tie up loose ends, but due to trying to cram a whole bunch of resolutions into such a short period, it comes across as hollow and forced. :opinions: Dolash posted:I thought she at least had a few things, her relationship with Davesprite and interactions with John on the three-year journey at least framed a few issues and her turn as Grimbark Jade was pretty good for ratcheting up conflict between her and the others (particularly Dave). It's more that the Retcon completely erased that and replaced it with nothing, to the point that Hussie had beta Calliope straight up tell her "you're a space hero and space heroes don't get to do anything". Her keeping the doggies occupied was weak, she didn't even kill Noire when she had the chance and for gently caress's sake I know his importance as a villain had declined but he still murdered whole universes just because he was an rear end in a top hat. dolash still best poster Plom Bar posted:and just generally keeping in mind that Hussie excels in character voice and worldbuilding moreso than actual narrative construction and conveyance. Also I feel this is the crux of the problem with the post-retcon onwards. All the worldbuilding and character moments now have to pay off, and what Hussie excels at falls by the wayside in the mad dash to the finish.
|
|
#
?
Nov 2, 2016 23:17
|
|
|
Also maybe it's just me, but on the reread, Dave and Karkat's voices just seem off on the lilipad. I can't put my finger on it.  also davekat is a bad ship with bad chemistry e: Maybe as a thought excersize for us 'complainers', how would you 'fix' Homestuck? where did it go wrong, how could it be repaired?
|
|
#
?
Nov 2, 2016 23:20
|
|
|
Clawtopsy posted:e: Maybe as a thought excersize for us 'complainers', how would you 'fix' Homestuck? where did it go wrong, how could it be repaired? oh god here we go
|
|
#
?
Nov 2, 2016 23:24
|
|
|
Clawtopsy posted:Also maybe it's just me, but on the reread, Dave and Karkat's voices just seem off on the lilipad. I can't put my finger on it. I would time travel back to when Andrew Hussie was a child, and work behind the scenes to give him an increasingly powerful passion for pottery, until his dedication to crafting sublime pots and vases leaves him without any time to even think about making webcomics
|
|
#
?
Nov 2, 2016 23:35
|
|
|
Clawtopsy posted:e: Maybe as a thought excersize for us 'complainers', how would you 'fix' Homestuck? where did it go wrong, how could it be repaired? foreshadow the retcon further in advance so that it feels less like a cop-out, as many people have complained, and condense the first half of Act 6 considerably. i personally dont have anything against the alpha kids, but if im going to be completely honest, it would probably serve the story a lot better if their roles were reduced by a lot, and focused more on how they relate to the betas.
|
|
#
?
Nov 2, 2016 23:43
|
|
|
Davekat is less of a bad ship and more of a ship we don't actually get to see happen.
|
|
#
?
Nov 2, 2016 23:54
|
|
|
Clawtopsy posted:
It went wrong when he aged the kids up by 3 years from 10 to 13 when he abandoned the idea of doing an all-flash homestuck.
|
|
#
?
Nov 2, 2016 23:58
|
|
|
Space Cadet Omoly posted:(which seems to be what's happening right now in canon with the guy running the snapchats). cohen confirmed he only did the halloween stuff, andrew was in charge of the credits snapchats on 10/25
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2016 00:09
|
|
|
Clawtopsy posted:e: Maybe as a thought excersize for us 'complainers', how would you 'fix' Homestuck? where did it go wrong, how could it be repaired? Erase Act 5 and following from existence. Do not introduce the trolls as characters. The role of external characters that push the kids forward can be played by the exiles instead. Lord English and Fish Hitler were lovely, pointless villains, so just keep Jack Noir as the antagonist instead of just declare at some point "you know what, never mind him" and have the character stop minding him.
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2016 00:16
|
|
|
One more thing I wanted to add about Dave and Dirk's resolution is that it has nothing to do with the retcon. Dave's issues with his Bro were established a long time ago, and while the post-retcon journey apparently gave him more time to sift through them (something we don't get to see and kind of have to infer from the lilypad scenes) his long-awaited chat with Dirk is much the same conversation that pre-retcon Dave would've had with pre-retcon Dirk. The messier parts of his post-retcon story concern his relationships with Karkat and Terezi and only because there's some gaps there we have to infer across, as well as whatever was going on with him and Jade being pushed offscreen so we're left to assume that it all worked out somehow. Rose and Jade suffered more simply because the retcon took bigger bites out of their backstories and they had less to fall back on afterward. Pre-Retcon Rose might've been more passive during Act 6 than she had been before, but at least her alcoholism and the strain it put on her relationship with Kanaya gave her some conflict, whereas post-Retcon Rose is pretty much fine and her reunion with Roxy doesn't have quite the same punch. The Rosesprite situation could've gone somewhere interesting, but time was short so it kind of just spun off into a joke and went nowhere. Also I don't recall using or even really reading the recaps, this thread is how I stayed current on what's going on. Problem Sleuth was easy enough to follow and while it had obvious structural problems it was also much lighter and sillier and reader participation was a much bigger driver. Even so, one thing it did do that isn't a case of rose-coloured glasses is have a clear and decisive ending and a satisfying epilogue.
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2016 00:28
|
|
|
Dolash posted:Even so, one thing it did do that isn't a case of rose-coloured glasses is have a clear and decisive ending and a satisfying epilogue. They got outside.
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2016 00:40
|
|
|
paranoid randroid posted:foreshadow the retcon further in advance so that it feels less like a cop-out, as many people have complained, and condense the first half of Act 6 considerably. have game over and the retcon happen towards the start of act 6
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2016 00:47
|
|
|
GAME OVER only really works if you establish Aranea's character first, and her reasons, which requires the treasure hunt. You could cut Aranea completely and have Vriska be the instigator of GAME OVER, but that significantly alters the fact that she's the master planner that allows everyone to win at the end.
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2016 00:52
|
|
|
AriadneThread posted:have game over and the retcon happen towards the start of act 6 maximum chutzpah option - open act six with game over and fill in the explanation as you go afterwards more realistically, just trimming the first 2/3rds of the act down and building out the last 3rd with more detail about the effects of the retcon on the characters, instead of condensing it all into the Vriskagram + massive text dumps, would probably do wonders. it might end up even freaking longer afterwards, but i think caring about that particular problem is not an option when discussing the comic
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2016 01:27
|
|
|
Sliding in to say I only found out about the epilogue today, and I liked it. Well, bye
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2016 01:27
|
|
|
paranoid randroid posted:maximum chutzpah option - open act six with game over and fill in the explanation as you go afterwards I was honestly going to suggest starting act 6 in medias res with the kids arriving in the alpha session and having to figure out just what the hell is going on. My big thing though would be to straighten out Calliope and Caliborn's story, and I think that'd be a great opportunity to both set up the retcon and give it payoff if changing the conditions of the universe is what allows Calliope to defeat her brother and stop Lord English. Introduce the alternate Calliope much, much earlier in the story so you can raise the question of how she came to be. Also give Jade an actual story post-retcon.
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2016 01:30
|
|
|
What was the deal with the Caliborn stuff at the end that's all I'm coming here to ask about
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2016 01:40
|
|
|
^^^^Caliborn needs them to attack him so the fight will got down as he foresaw it in Caliborn's Masterpiece, where he will become Lord English but also put four of the kids into the Icon that will later be used by Vriska against Lord English, hopefully defeating him. Since these events are necessary to close a causal loop, at some point the players will leave their happy new home and go after him anyway, but for the moment he has no way of making it happen apart from trying to provoke them over snapchat.Plom Bar posted:They got outside. Ayup. Until the credits went up people weren't even 100% sure the Homestuck players even managed that. Dolash fucked around with this message at 01:58 on Nov 3, 2016 |
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2016 01:55
|
|
|
Dolash posted:Ayup. Until the credits went up people weren't even 100% sure the Homestuck players even managed that. Well. Hate to be rude, but that's cuz some o' y'all are kinda dumb
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2016 02:11
|
|
|
what does it mean 'to go outside' anyway? what is, truly, the outside of the heart?
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2016 02:26
|
|
|
Clawtopsy posted:e: Maybe as a thought excersize for us 'complainers', how would you 'fix' Homestuck? where did it go wrong, how could it be repaired? We've already done this. I'm sure you can at least guess my answer.
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2016 02:27
|
|
|
Clawtopsy posted:Also maybe it's just me, but on the reread, Dave and Karkat's voices just seem off on the lilipad. I can't put my finger on it. I'm not even a "complainer", but I'd honestly like if the "all timelines are just fragments of the one true self" thing explained way earlier. Maybe give Dirk some dialog about feeling like he's gone over a lovely plan in his head and just KNOWS it'll loving work, or Nepeta being so dead set on hooking up with Karkat because she just feels like there's a chance (because there's an actual splinter where it happened), or something. Have Heart players and possibly Time players allude to some greater sense of fragmented selves and timelines. I feel like if it had gone there early and often enough, Dave going "I think we're all just the Prime Self and all other timelines are pieces of us and some of them are relevant to our growth" would feel more like an "Ah ha!" moment rather than a "wait, really?" moment.
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2016 02:44
|
|
|
Clawtopsy posted:e: Maybe as a thought excersize for us 'complainers', how would you 'fix' Homestuck? where did it go wrong, how could it be repaired? The whole Doc Scratch intermission that follows just feels deadly on a re-read (and it killed my attempt to reread the story after AOA6 and Act 7). I think a lot of the problems with Act 6 come from assuming we were going to get payoffs for the sweeping theoretical stuff brought up here, and since in fact we didn't it just feels like the narrative through this entire part turns to molasses. I honestly think putting the rest of Act 5.2 into the same format as the first 2/3 of it, with a few more flashes as necessary and culminating with Cascade, would have made for a much more tightly paced story. Ending the comic that way (or on intermission 2 to set up a sequel) would have been pretty awesome, and honestly I think Act 6 is more-or-less tolerable up until the big non-payoff when the Beta kids arrive and the narrative fragments irretrievably--which wouldn't have happened without the glitch precedent set by this section of 5.2. jalapeno_dude fucked around with this message at 03:05 on Nov 3, 2016 |
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2016 02:57
|
|
|
jalapeno_dude posted:Ending the comic that way (or on intermission 2 to set up a sequel) would have been pretty awesome. i've said it before, but i pretty much already consider this to be the case
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2016 03:01
|
|
|
Late to the party but whatever,Arsenic Lupin posted:Speaking of which, isn't there a timeskip problem? The Kids and Trolls ectobiologize an enormous number of kids and trolls, dump them on the carapacians, and jump 5000 years into the future. That means that Karkat and Kanaya totally avoid their sworn duty of raising the next generation of trolls to not be jerks. We know they don't stay behind, because they'd have died of old age if they had. Yeah well Karkat was supposed to be some kind of leader as well so. Some poo poo I don't think anyone's brought up: -In the shot of the black hole that Terezi captioned as "????????" am I crazy or is there something visible inside there...? -I don't think the deal with John is that his friends stopped caring about him. I think it's more that he's withdrawing for some reason and they're accommodating/acquiescing to that. You can see it in the third (19th?) birthday, he is reluctant to do anything and it's more or less Jade's idea for anyone to go over. After a while I think most of them realized that he genuinely does want to just be by himself on birthdays, or maybe in general. Whether he is happy with this or why, idk. Irony Be My Shield posted:That was pretty cool. The impression I got is that John feels out of place with the retcon cast, like he knows he's not their John and they're not his original set of friends. Roxy dgaf I guess. Clawtopsy posted:There still feels like there's supposed to be a shoe that dropped after Collide's climactic anticlimax, and Act 7's ominous ending. An ending of happy smiles and babies everywhere still just doesn't feel earned yet. This is intensely true.
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2016 03:25
|
|
|
The Doc Scratch stuff also feels weird to me now that we know the One True timeline is one where Vriska survives, and apparently is an entirely beneficial influence on the rest of the group. So much of Act 5 is about how the Troll's speedrunning of the game is bad, and how Vriska in particular is fundamentally a terrible influence on her group who would get them all killed if Terezi doesn't stop her. And a lot of the effective parts of Act 6 leading up to Game Over reiterate this through Vriska and Aranea. Plus [S] Terezi: Remem8er seems to be strongly telling us that Terezi's original choice to kill Vriska was worth it. But in the last parts of Act 6 it seems like Terezi's retconning of the death doesn't really lead to a Vriska with a healthier attitude, but one with the same exact speedrunning methods. I was one of those people convinced that EOA6 didn't feel right precisely because it seemed like everything had been too easy and so something had to go wrong in the same way that it did in the Troll session. But with Act 7 + the new postcanon stuff all of that feels ignored, and so all that development in 5.2 feels narratively pointless. I'm coming to agree more and more with the people who feel like somehow we missed the True Ending and ended up with a crappy one. Or in summary, Clawtopsy posted:There still feels like there's supposed to be a shoe that dropped after Collide's climactic anticlimax, and Act 7's ominous ending. An ending of happy smiles and babies everywhere still just doesn't feel earned yet. jalapeno_dude fucked around with this message at 03:30 on Nov 3, 2016 |
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2016 03:26
|
|
|
jalapeno_dude posted:The Doc Scratch stuff also feels weird to me now that we know the One True timeline is one where Vriska survives, and apparently is an entirely beneficial influence on the rest of the group. So much of Act 5 is about how the Troll's speedrunning of the game is bad, and how Vriska in particular is fundamentally a terrible influence on her group who would get them all killed if Terezi doesn't stop her. And a lot of the effective parts of Act 6 leading up to Game Over reiterate this through Vriska and Aranea. But it seems like Terezi's retconning of the death doesn't really seem to lead to a Vriska with a healthier attitude, but one with the same exact speedrunning methods. I was one of those people convinced that EOA6 didn't feel right precisely because it seemed like everything had been too easy and so something had to go wrong in the same way that it did in the Troll session. But with Act 7 + the new postcanon stuff all of that feels ignored, and so all that development in 5.2 feels narratively pointless. I'm coming to agree more and more with the people who feel like somehow we missed the True Ending and ended up with a crappy one. Every single time Vriska appeared in the comic after she was killed in Act 5.2 it lessened and degraded her as a character, and I'm saying this as someone who really liked her as a character. GunnerJ fucked around with this message at 03:35 on Nov 3, 2016 |
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2016 03:29
|
|
|
if i check back here in another three months i'm going to find a thread that's convinced itself act 7 was actually a masterful troll on the audience and the REAL ending is going to drop any day now
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2016 03:31
|
|
|
Ehh, maybe Hussie actually knew what he was doing all along and all of these plot threads will be masterfully concluded in A7.7777...... of Homestuck 2: Stuck Harder when it drops in 2413.
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2016 03:34
|
|
|
jalapeno_dude posted:For me it was halfway through [S] Flip, when the glitches overpowered the story (so I guess from a (meta?)causal perspective it's actually this panel that's to blame) and forced us into a subjective eternity of Doc Scratch. I really like Act 5 up to this point; even on a reread Act 5.2 up to this point is doing a really effective job of cutting back and forth between the troll and human stories. But the interruption of [S]Flip feels to me like the first time where the payoff for loving with conventional pacing isn't worth the cost to the reading experience--unlike e.g. the various psyches in Acts 1-4 and the preemptive spoiling of Aradia's ghosthood in Act 5.1, which I think do benefit the story. The bit where Scratch is telling us the Vriska vs. Terezi confrontation maybe isn't the best but honestly the scrapbook (+banner shenanigans) is probably one of my favourite parts in general. The Dave and Rose convo is great, the Doomed John and Vriska is a bittersweet coda that would have been a great send off to her if she didn't come back... I dunno just the kind of mood during the scrapbook section I felt was great, like yes, everyone is gearing up for some crazy poo poo to go down, we're revisiting some loose ends and what not. It did the same feeling much better than the lilypad convos did leading up to collide. uh I dunno I just thought that section had some great moments and was done in a really interesting, novel way.
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2016 03:49
|
|
|
GunnerJ posted:Every single time Vriska appeared in the comic after she was killed in Act 5.2 it lessened and degraded her as a character, and I'm saying this as someone who really liked her as a character. agreed. 5.2 Vriska is great and one of my faves. Act 6 Vriska in both her forms is awful, even though she acts pretty much the same.
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2016 03:51
|
|
|
Mazerunner posted:agreed. 5.2 Vriska is great and one of my faves. Act 6 Vriska in both her forms is awful, even though she acts pretty much the same. And it's so weird because obviously Vriska's Final Form is supposed to be a combination of the best aspects of both, Hussie is practically screaming that at us and then rubbing it in by having them talk to each other. But then nope, best Vriska is the one who unceremoniously discarded all those creeping moral doubts she was starting to express in her conversations with John before she got killed and decided that nope, she was right all along. ...John who is currently feeling abandoned by his friends, has no canon ship, and never got to talk to Vriska after Cascade (except for being ordered around post retcon, unless they actually had a deep conversation then and I'm forgetting it). Not saying the True Ending theory is true, but it fits... jalapeno_dude fucked around with this message at 04:19 on Nov 3, 2016 |
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2016 04:05
|
|
|
jalapeno_dude posted:And it's so weird because obviously Vriska's Final Form is supposed to be a combination of the best aspects of both, Hussie is practically screaming that at us and then rubbing it in by having them talk to us. But then nope, best Vriska is the one who unceremoniously discarded all those creeping moral doubts she was starting to express in her conversations with John before she got killed and decided that nope, she was right all along. She's not the best Vriska, though. Meenah even says so, when Vriska complains about what a disgusting parody of herself (Vriska) is, and Meenah basically says "It's true that I'm more entertained by the you who's an rear end in a top hat, but that's not the same as you being right." (Vriska) was the result of Vriska making choices that made a better life for Vriska. The fact that they weren't what the alpha timeline mandated doesn't make that not true.
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2016 04:20
|
|
|
Just face it. Vriska is better than your favorite character. If your favorite character is Vriska, chances are there's a better version of her in Paradox Space than the one you like.
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2016 04:32
|
|
|
Dolash posted:^^^^Caliborn needs them to attack him so the fight will got down as he foresaw it in Caliborn's Masterpiece, where he will become Lord English but also put four of the kids into the Icon that will later be used by Vriska against Lord English, hopefully defeating him. Since these events are necessary to close a causal loop, at some point the players will leave their happy new home and go after him anyway, but for the moment he has no way of making it happen apart from trying to provoke them over snapchat. I thought it was specifically done in another timeline that he mentioned in that little intermission with the clay.
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2016 04:54
|
|
|
Rand Brittain posted:She's not the best Vriska, though. Meenah even says so, when Vriska complains about what a disgusting parody of herself (Vriska) is, and Meenah basically says "It's true that I'm more entertained by the you who's an rear end in a top hat, but that's not the same as you being right." Right, I agree with you, but the ending of Homestuck doesn't, at least to the extent that we can interpret the characters who get rewarded by making it to the end of the game as the best versions of themselves. Though I guess it's still sort of ambiguous as to whether Vriska survived.
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2016 04:58
|
|
|
Sorry, Aranea actually pulled off Vriska's arc better by virtue of being more sympathetic, and actually having it end.GunnerJ posted:Roxy dgaf I guess. Roxy's relationship with Callie is unhealthy to the extreme. GunnerJ posted:This is intensely true. 
Clawtopsy fucked around with this message at 08:38 on Nov 3, 2016 |
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2016 08:35
|
|
|
Aurora posted:I thought it was specifically done in another timeline that he mentioned in that little intermission with the clay. No, the intermission with the clay is Caliborn's interpretation of a vision he had of how he will become Lord English. It hasn't happened yet, in order for it to happen the players have to choose to leave their happy new universe and come after him, which is why he keeps harassing them. It's still the same timeline though. Eventually, he'll succeed, because it's the only way to complete the causality loop that leads to Lord English existing, and since Lord English is rampaging and battling Vriska and the ghost army right now that loop must be a thing that gets completed. However, he doesn't realize that the icon he uses on the four beta kids during that fight will later be used by Vriska against Lord English, and we're to presume that it will release the kids and they'll beat up Lord English. Feels weird calling them kids still now that they're 20. Also the fact that it's just the eight kids who go after Caliborn in the Masterpiece makes me wonder if something bad's gonna befall everyone else, like he can't get them to come after him so he attacks preemptively. Alternatively since the eight humans are the only ones left with god powers they might just leave the rest behind.
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2016 08:51
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 26, 2024 23:36 |
|
|
Dolash posted:Feels weird calling them kids still now that they're 20. Their heads haven't even conformed to the adult proportions they were promised, yet.
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2016 08:54
|
|