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Dirk's self-loathing turned him into a villain. Also, I had forgotten the horror of Trickster Mode.
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Apr 26, 2019 01:47
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Space Cadet Omoly posted:Did he not have a Jake by the end? I thought he was mind controlling one. Who all was on his ship by the end of it? He manipulated Jake into being in love with Dirk again, solely for the purpose of telling Jake to gently caress off when he begged to come along on the spaceship.
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Apr 26, 2019 01:48
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Ursine Catastrophe posted:it's homestuck, it's not even over when you see a body, let alone when you don't it's also incredibly important to never turn your back on the bodies.
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Apr 26, 2019 01:54
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Some of that "I'll become the villain" confession near the end by Dirk seemed to be a mix of rationalizing away any possible self-doubt he could have about his actions while also giving him an out if he's defeated to pretend like this was his plan all along and actually he's a hero for taking on the responsibility of becoming the villain they needed.
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Apr 26, 2019 02:01
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Arsenic Lupin posted:He manipulated Jake into being in love with Dirk again, solely for the purpose of telling Jake to gently caress off when he begged to come along on the spaceship. Wow, Dirk is a huge douche. Anyway, I'm sure Dirk's plan will end the way all his plans do: horribly.
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Apr 26, 2019 02:12
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A Dirk/alt!Calliope parallel. Dirk disdains Rose's request for her favorite jewelry; alt!Calliope makes Jane shove some fragile objects off the mantel to make room for the juju. I mean, brainwashing your ex to be hopelessly in love with you is bad, but throwing away a lady's jewelry? Intolerable.
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Apr 26, 2019 03:08
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Meenah is great. That is all.
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Apr 26, 2019 03:21
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Sup everyone, how has your loving decade been. I assembled my thoughts on this new development for a friend and thought I would share them here. I’ve only competed Candy so far, haven’t even started on Meat. However, I think that I’m finally starting to understand what Andrew Hussie is trying to say with this godforsaken story. The characters in a story only exist within the minds of the audience. If there were no audience, the character would just be ink on a page, or light being projected onto a screen, or signals being sent to a tv set or computer monitor. The version of a given character that exists within the mind of the audience member, then, is the true version of the character. It must be, for there is no alternative. That’s the only version there is. When I was about halfway through candy, the emergence of fetishistic concepts which I found ugly and the progression of the characters in a direction which I found improbable made me think that the story was dissolving into the sort of liminal space within the mind of the readers from which fanfiction is born. However, I ask you: if that’s where the story was going, then where was it coming from? As I said, the characters simply don’t exist outside of the minds of the readers. The fact is that when a person writes a story about what they think happens to the characters in Homestuck after the ending, they are simply writing down the facts of the story as it exists in their own head. The same even applies to a story where the characters run a coffee shop together, or fall in love in a way they didn’t in the original work, or pee on each other while being swallowed by each other, or whatever. Those versions of the characters are just as real as the canon versions, because they are all cut from the same cloth. So here’s the truth of the matter: there is John. When I think of John, you might think of one sort of person, and I may think of a different person. He might be a charismatic do-gooder, or a bumbling nincompoop who tries to do good in spite of his naievety, or a selfish jerk whose social incompetence hides the fact that he only cares about himself, or an empty man who is just going through the motions after being irreversibly damaged by an unimaginable trauma. Your interpretation is equally valid as mine, and therefore they are both John. That’s what the characters in this story, and every story, truly are. They are a conglomeration of themselves as they exist in every headcanon, every fanfic, every fanart and music video and flithy piece of pornography and sculpture and cosplay that’s ever depicted them. This is the nature of a story character. It’s just that the characters in this particular story can break down the walls between their various iterations and become a version of themselves that is every version at once: their Ultimate Self. In a fictional story, the character who is the true version of themselves is like a god. They are a god. This is because a character who is fully one with themselves is the version of themselves that exists within the minds of the audience, which means that as long as there is an audience, they are REAL. This gives them the power to tell a story of their own. Within a story, this is akin to creating an actual universe. Sound familliar? This is the true goal of Sburb. The ultimate ascension. The transformation from story character to story teller, and therefore from universe inhabitant to universe creator. In a fictional setting, the two are one and the same. There’s the meaning I think I’ve gleaned from this ridiculous and frankly not that good story. The fact that I have managed to divine some sort of message probably means I have gone insane. God help me. P.S. Karkat is always fantastic and the lone voice of reason no matter where he is.
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Apr 26, 2019 04:09
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If that's what you got out of it without reading Meat, then I think I'll be interested to hear where your thinking goes afterward. How people read the stories seems to have significantly affected how they received and interpreted them - personally I read them alternating every chapter and can't imagine how much harder it'd be to see where the story was going without doing that. Suffice it to say you're not crazy to read in those inferences.
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Apr 26, 2019 04:39
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yeah i cant imagine reading Candy before Meat poo poo would be weird
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Apr 26, 2019 05:53
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paranoid randroid posted:yeah i cant imagine reading Candy before Meat I actively recommend it, honestly.
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Apr 26, 2019 06:00
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does anyone have that 2012 era picture of all the hypothetical offspring that candy is clearly mocking, it's second only to canon big tid vriska and fire head deviantart lord english as the best homestuck fanarts
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Apr 26, 2019 06:15
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paranoid randroid posted:yeah i cant imagine reading Candy before Meat I did it that way. I think that any order you read them in, including alternating chapters, switching at the point in Meat where it recommends you read Candy, and picking one at random to finish first, has interesting effects on how it unfolds.
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Apr 26, 2019 06:38
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So anyone remember on this past 10/25 when Hussie had a picture taken of himself wearing Dirk shades, accompanied with the message that he was working on the epilogue Because that was a thing that happened
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Apr 26, 2019 07:42
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Has someone already made a chart of where each of the characters are by the end of meat and candy?
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Apr 26, 2019 07:51
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Dirk posted:TT: So that's how crazy it is for her to think I'm disappointed in her. From when they are on their Quest Slab before they ascend to God Tier.
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Apr 26, 2019 10:24
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Game Over. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idoYCVLh2qI "Serket ruins everyfin"
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Apr 26, 2019 19:06
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Why won't Homestuck die? At this point it'd be a Just death.
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Apr 26, 2019 22:14
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Malpais Legate posted:Why won't Homestuck die? At this point it'd be a Just death. Because you keep coming back
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Apr 26, 2019 22:30
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Plom Bar posted:Because you keep coming back This is victim blaming and I'll have none of it!!!
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Apr 26, 2019 23:09
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Android Blues posted:Some unspoilered thoughts on Candy now that we're a day out: Hey, I'm just going to skip like 20 pages of discourse because while I like this post and think it's a good analysis it's one I fundamentally disagree with. I don't know if my own take on things 100% holds up, but I think you're kind of under-selling the significance of the part near the end where the whole script gets flipped and we see the Candy story from Roxy's point of view and not John's. What I think is that John's story in Candy is basically about dealing with depression and as someone who's struggled with this, I found it honestly kind of uplifting. (Not saying you haven't and that's why your PoV differs, I don't know you, just saying how this affected me.) Warning for probably thousands of words of Homestuck analysis in the Homestuck thread coming up, there's no tl;dr. One thing that this whole epilogue jam harps on a lot is the importance of subjective perspectives and the agendas behind them, whether this means the perspectives of narrators, characters, or audiences. I'm going to just consider John's perspective for a while because it provides the closest thing to a unifying theme of the Candy chapters: his perspective is that the Candy events are fundamentally unreal and something is warping them to satisfy his desires in unearned ways. We see a lot of the overall development of events from his point of view, so it's easy to buy into this, especially since as Homestuck readers, a metanarrative plot point like that is something we're primed to expect and accept. There are also tbf a number of things on both tines of the fork to support this idea or something like it that I can't fully explain (only read the whole thing once, ended up finishing in the early morning uh today, dunno how well this all holds up tbh). But consider two facts of John's perspective: First, John was endowed with the ability to alter his reality like an editor changing a story and he used those abilities in really cosmically significant ways. This is likely to give him a metanarrative bent to how he views things along with a tendency to assume he has a lot of control over stuff. Second, John is depressed. There are two important parts of the depressed mindset for this interpretation. One is the tendency to catastrophize things, to believe that everything is cosmically and unalterably hosed. Another is the belief that you don't deserve good things, to be flummoxed by them and subvert them. Take these two things together and you can see John's belief that the whole world went bad because of his choices and that everyone is unreal and just artificially responding to his whims as how a depressed person who had "retcon powers" might interpret the big problems in his life and also explain away getting nice things. The problem with this whole idea of his is that it doesn't make any sense, it is both self-contradictory and doesn't fit with events that are depicted. If reality is bending itself to fulfill John's desires, why does he not get what he wants and everything ends up sucking because of his choice? (Partially this ties into the greater theme of people not getting what they want that was established with this whole thing being framed as fanfic.) Candy part 38 is basically the place where this all gets flipped and you see what's really up. I think it's downplaying this chapter to say that in entails "Roxy insisting to John that she has interiority." She pretty clearly has interiority since this segment is narrated entirely from her perspective. And what's narrated is the perspective of someone who couldn't deal with a romantic partner that was severely depressed and not handling it. This part in particular was a big gut punch to me: "John laughs, and there’s a shadowed flicker of warmth to it. Roxy immediately wants to fan it—to make him laugh for real—but she knows by now that it’s not her job to make him happy. That was something she gave up on years ago." So, personal aside, my first relationship ended in part because I had unrecognized and untreated depression, I think. My ex told me once that she just couldn't deal with the fact that she never felt like anything she could do could make me laugh or smile. So this rings pretty true to me. What we're learning here is one part of the reason why Roxy always seemed suspiciously accommodating to John: she saw someone she loved unhappy and was desperately trying to make him happy. The other part comes after John lays out his "this is all fake and designed to please me" theory and she cuts him off: "She feels a little bit bad cutting him off. This conversational space they’ve carved out for themselves is balanced on a tenuous trust, and she doesn’t want to scare him away. It’s just that she could feel his whole speech gathered up inside him, poised to gush out in a long rote ramble, and it’s frankly just. Some bullshit. She knows more than he does, and she doesn’t need to hear it. She’s not a kid anymore, and she doesn’t have to pretend someone else is right just to keep the peace if she doesn’t want to." Roxy wasn't being accommodating because the plot was warping her personality to do whatever John wanted. She was just trying very hard, and counter-productively, to make work something she wanted badly to work. And he is far from the only person she's done that with, considering her attempts to smooth over political issues to keep her friend group together. If this wasn't enough, she really brings it all home in these two bits of dialog: quote:ROXY: you think you choice mattered so much that no one elses could measure up? quote:ROXY: uh I can appreciate thinking that the story of Candy as told doesn't develop this idea very well up to this point, but it's hard to see a flaw in Roxy's arguments here. So it's also very hard for me to take John's idea about why things turned out this way seriously after this. It simply does not hold up to me, and "John's depressed and his depression theory about why things happen resulted in him interpreting interactions wrongly" seems a lot more plausible. In this sense, him learning to value whatever life he has and stop worrying about the metaplot or whatever basically means stopping the catastrophizing and accepting that good things can happen to him. Which I really appreciated even if he's still got a long road ahead of him before he can really do that. This is not to say that John's decision of Candy over Meat had no metanarrative repercussions. There are some things to support his idea, at least partially. But I think this goes to what the difference between Meat and Candy is imv. Meat is all about big plot developments, high-stakes confrontation, lore, and story climaxes. Candy is about character development and interactions that have nothing to do with greater plot significance. When you give up on Meat for Candy, then despite all the gonzo poo poo that happens in Candy, what you get is the story of people living out their lives normally (eta: I mean, as normally as people can when they're Homestuck characters, like don't get me wrong, I know lots of weird hosed up poo poo happens but bear with me). Friends grow up and grow apart. People get married sometimes for the wrong reasons and sometimes it doesn't work out. They have kids and don't always succeed at being parents. Political developments have unevenly significant impacts on their lives depending on their place in society. Things aren't actually always going to be happy, even if you've been primed to expect that by the nature of what Candy was signaled to be. What defines Candy is not so much fun "sweet" things happening but that the deep Homestuck lore and Dirk's schemes and such aren't the decisive, driving elements. Playing with the characters' personalities and their outcomes regardless of whether they "matter" on some metaplot level is. This, significantly, includes John's retcon powers, which he discovers he's lost after a character-relationship significant offer to use them in a pretty clear sign that the narrative is not really his toy in this branch. (Similarly, even in Meat you're not guaranteed to get the big storyline climax comeuppance you were expecting, I mean let's face it the bad guy wins there in the most degrading way possible and basically gets away with it.) There's definitely something going on with John and the overall plot that I haven't completely figured out but I do think "everyone's been reduced to John-pliable caricatures" is less likely than "John is misinterpreting people because of depression." I will look at one other scene before I stop typing because it's another hint at what I am arguing here: (Vriska) looking at clouds and noting suspiciously John-centric shapes in them. But they're not all John stuff, and she has to admit that clouds can take whatever form she wants. When (Vriska) says she suspects John is super powerful and important in ways that go beyond his personal ability, and Vriska says this is dumb because John's a washed up joke, this is a clue. (Vriska) has her own perspective, and that perspective clearly includes the idea that John is special and supernaturally influential, so maybe there's another reason she sees clouds that look like dad hats and shaving cream? Just like there's another reason John interprets events from a similar premise for different ends besides him being right about the world. So thank you for reading my words about Homestuck. ETA: I've read more of the thread and I do want to say that I get why Candy seemed so needlessly dire and bleak to some and why the "twist" in Candy 38 didn't work for them. I just think it worked in this specific way that I appreciated and there's more to it/it's more valid than other think I guess. GunnerJ fucked around with this message at 18:40 on Apr 27, 2019 |
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Apr 27, 2019 17:03
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GunnerJ posted:So thank you for reading my words about Homestuck. i think this is a good take. i also like how john's inability to really understand roxy is narratively mirrored by dirk in meat talking about how he can't read their mind and they're basically a mystery to him a lot of the writing about roxy is definitely a strength of this epilogue, especially the way their gender issues diverge in the different timelines and how the various third parties react really rings true (which makes sense, as it's apparently primarily written by a trans person from what i can tell from twitter)
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Apr 27, 2019 17:20
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Hey, thanks, Imma write more words now because I apparently can't stop thinking about this as I read. 1. Still haven't finished the thread wondering if anyone has thoughts about this: quote:CALLIOPE: yes. take all the time yoU need. Uh, but yeah actually, what are "the results"? 2. Why is Dirk so invested in Jane becoming president if he's going to gently caress off for some grand apotheosis scheme? Well we've seen him use his narration ability for petty/personal grudge reasons unrelated to The Plan (e.g., Vriska) and so it stands to reason that his support for Jane's presidency is because, like Jane, he has antipathy for trolls in general for similar reasons. But on a meta level I feel like this is making a comment on the way the fanbase reacted to the trolls. See, Meat vs. Candy seems like a refinement of an earlier idea about Caliborn and Calliope representing two sides of the fandom. And it seems that there's a statement about which side of the fandom you are on if you felt that the story somehow went off the rails when the trolls were introduced on Alteria and came to overwhelm the story as you knew and loved it. Maybe they should always have had a smaller role compared the the original human characters? Maybe that would have been better. (I have some sympathy for this point of view tbh even though we got some great stuff out of the trolls.) Welp, if that's you, here's the ultimate villain of the story elevating a xenophobic eugenecist to power to prevent the troll population from growing out of control to overwhelm the human population. On the flip side, in Candy, that doesn't quite happen and we see the trolls growing in power to seemingly inevitably overwhelm the human government. Someone posited that humans are hosed in this timeline because they are not a natural warrior race, but at the same time, Karkat's movement in Meat was the more diverse and inclusive one, so I don't think wiping humans out is the goal. In Meat, everything seems on track to limit trolls to their "proper" proportion of relevance (no resistance is going to happen over there). In Candy, trolls take on a more and more powerful role but maybe won't completely wipe out the relevance of humans either. ~ make u think ~ 3. Seriously wtf was up with the horrorterrors, they were the only thing I wanted explained, come the gently caress on
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Apr 27, 2019 19:00
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I think Dirk's support for Jane's presidency was misdirection to create the opening for him to shoot Jade.
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Apr 27, 2019 19:13
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Bongo Bill posted:I think Dirk's support for Jane's presidency was misdirection to create the opening for him to shoot Jade. He was planning it before he had any reason to do that though. Also he nuked Karkat's campaign after he did that.
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Apr 27, 2019 19:14
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I had some thoughts about Dirk and Jane's presidency today. Specifically, that even though it's not forecast in the text, maybe this is Dirk repeating his old patterns towards Jane on a more intense level, much as he's repeating his patterns with Jake by forcing him to love him. In Act 6, Dirk is always insistent that Jane is the leader of the alpha kids. He says that he believes in her, that she'll be a great leader once they get into the game, and that all he wants is to help her reach her potential. But really, Dirk never relinquishes control - and Jane spends most of her screen time in Act 6 not being fully clued in on what's going on, or on what he has planned. So he's really interested in having her be in a position of power where she can reach her potential, and that interest even seems sincere, but he doesn't seem to realise that he's hogging the spotlight and stifling her growth by slotting her into this "team figurehead" role and then not allowing her to do anything with it. Ultimate Dirk still wants Jane to be a leader. He really cares about and believes in her. He just wants that leadership to be his style, on his terms, and to ultimately be meaningless to anything that actually matters even slightly. So he maybe tweaks the most domineering parts of her into action, sets her on a collision course with Dave and Karkat, and then rigs reality so she'll win. Jane's the president now! Dirk has, once again, put her in a figurehead role that means nothing and is mostly irrelevant to what's actually going on. That's his version of friendship. I can't see it as anything other than totally sincere, albeit really condescending and creepy.
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Apr 27, 2019 23:14
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These last couple posts have been really on the money. I'll add to the Jane/Dirk analysis that I think there's an interesting parallel to John and Rose's friendship, and particularly Rose's belief in his leadership. Rose has recognized John as the leader in the beta-kid group for a long time, and especially since her Ultimate Self issues began manifesting she also seems aware of his protagonism and what that means for all of them in terms of managing the plot. There's a difference, though, between being the capital-L Leader and the one who knows what's going on and can push things into motion. Unlike Dirk taking for granted that he has the right to manipulate his friend into a figurehead, though, Rose seems to take deadly seriously the responsibility of shepherding her friend, and is clearly affected by knowing there are things she can't tell him. Even back in the session, Rose seems to take genuine inspiration from John's indefatigable optimism and spirit, even knowing that he doesn't really understand what they're up against. Considering the moral of her wizard-fiction, she clearly has some "ignorance is bliss" envy, but I don't think it curdles into the sort of contempt and arrogance that Dirk has for people who don't see things on his level. I like the theories that suggest Rose, Roxy, and Dead Calliope are engaged in a long-con plan to defeat Dirk and shape the post-canon destiny through subtly splitting the timeline, partly because it showcases a very different approach to the responsibility of operating on the narrative plane. Rose trying to both shape the direction of the story and respect her friends and their autonomy in order to defeat someone who does not is a case for her as narrator, if anyone has to be. Dolash fucked around with this message at 00:17 on Apr 28, 2019 |
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Apr 28, 2019 00:13
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I want Hussie to release a full version of Complacency of the Learned and Wizardy Herbert.
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Apr 28, 2019 00:31
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Alright, I finished my re-read of Homestuck. Woo, quite a ride after all these years. I must say, I actually really liked the ending this time. Collide and Act 7 are just loving gorgeous. The low point remains Act 6. There's parts of Act 6 that are great, but there's a lot of long boring parts between them. It felt a lot mroe like a slog than the previous Acts, especially on a re-read.
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Apr 28, 2019 04:31
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I remain adamant that the ending is vastly improved when taken immediately following the rest of the story. I don't blame anyone for not having the will to try it for themselves, but just about everybody who manages in this thread really does come away feeling better than we all did on April 13, 2016.
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Apr 28, 2019 12:09
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Anyway, can some one in this thread please do me a favor and declare, with unearned authoritative bluster, that Hiveswap Act 2 will never be released?
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Apr 28, 2019 12:12
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Plom Bar posted:Anyway, can some one in this thread please do me a favor and declare, with unearned authoritative bluster, that Hiveswap Act 2 will never be released? Do it yourself, ya lazy lunk.
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Apr 28, 2019 12:20
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Plom Bar posted:Anyway, can some one in this thread please do me a favor and declare, with unearned authoritative bluster, that Hiveswap Act 2 will never be released? It's been two years to produce what would be around two hours' worth of gameplay on an engine that already exists. It ain't happening.
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Apr 28, 2019 12:39
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Tenebrais posted:It's been two years to produce what would be around two hours' worth of gameplay on an engine that already exists. Perfect, thank you
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Apr 28, 2019 12:43
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Going back to the theory that Dirk is pulling a Lelouch, my interpretation is that he's setting Jane up as another antagonist who can create enough conflict to continue prolonging the narrative.
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Apr 28, 2019 12:44
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Here's an idea: If the story continues Meat and Candy are going to end up getting flipped thematically, thus fitting into the figure 8 motif and the interconnectedness of the stories. By that I mean Candy is getting more bloody (which makes sense as there's about to be a war) and Meat is going to get sweeter (I have no idea how this would happen, I'm just sort of working backwards from the figure 8 idea).
Space Cadet Omoly fucked around with this message at 14:18 on Apr 28, 2019 |
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Apr 28, 2019 12:53
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Space Cadet Omoly posted:...Meat is going to get sweeter (I have no idea how this would happen, I'm just sort of working backwards from the figure 8 idea). Lots of time wandering the universe trying to follow Dirk's trail, stopping by random planets and anomalies in an episodic fashion because there may be clues, allows for character moments and interactions that don't move the grand plot forward much but are entertaining. Get ready for....... Homestuck Trek.
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Apr 28, 2019 14:23
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GunnerJ posted:Lots of time wandering the universe trying to follow Dirk's trail, stopping by random planets and anomalies in an episodic fashion because there may be clues, allows for character moments and interactions that don't move the grand plot forward much but are entertaining. You did it, you cracked the code. You found a way to sweeten the meat. Man, that idea is really good.
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Apr 28, 2019 14:34
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Been listening to a whole bunch of the old music and Vol 5 is still A+ stuff. There are individual tracks I like more (and Hier of Grief still kinda gives me Feels) but Vol 5 as a whole has some of the best stuff overall.
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Apr 28, 2019 16:15
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I wondered if there'd be some final communication between the Meat and Candy timelines at the end, like Dirk's ship gets chased all the way to the Candy world or the two groups of players video-call each other using Candy John and Terezi's phones. Just some moment of catharsis for each group to finally see how their lives would've been different and let go of the idea.
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Apr 28, 2019 17:17
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