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The whole thing was great. Showing the reader how revival methods like dreamselves were gone, killing off characters suddenly like a wham page in a comic, flipping everything on its head by having Gamzee of all people being the biggest threat even though Karkat just watched a rampage by Eridan, the use of the SNES RPG motif to give the reader some control in spots, the atmospheric flashes like "3xShowdown", the introspection by Karkat of whether or not he hosed up and lead everyone down a Beta timeline and this being how it resolves, the constant honks even in the music of the flashes. Everything was breakneck, every update was building tension or acting on it, and there were lots of updates. Hussie was really trying to show anyone could go, especially with the (fakeout) Kanaya death. I still think to myself what it exactly was that made Gamzee snap. Either finding Tavro's body or the ICP thing, on top of the slime withdrawal.
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Nov 25, 2019 04:30
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smh that it's called 'murderstuck' and not 'the gampage'
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Nov 25, 2019 04:35
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For me it felt like the pages were being posted at a slower pace during the whole thing. If I'm remembering correctly a new page would be posted every few hours. You wanted to stay glued to the internet for what would happen next. What would happen next? Who would die next? Would Karkat ever figure out what Scratch meant by "don't turn your back on the body"? I think it was then that some people found out how to find all the currently uploaded but not posted yet pages.
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Nov 25, 2019 04:43
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Seriously one of thr most intense bits of media I've read to the extent seeing the words "Homestuck could have updated RIGHT NOW" makes me excited
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Nov 25, 2019 05:16
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TF2 servers going silent and motionless as everyone alt-tabs and F5's because someone said homestuck updated
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Nov 25, 2019 05:29
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Homestuck would go silent for months at a time during Act 6, so I doubt a monthly (and eventually bi-monthly) update schedule is going to be that bad. Sure, at its peak a Homestuck Patreon would have blown past 2000 patrons in a matter of hours, but it says a lot that Homestuck can hold a audience even after its tumultuous life post-ending.
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Nov 25, 2019 05:38
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I started reading New Year's 2011, so I finished binging the archives about a two days before the killings began. It was a loving nightmare. I'd be at work for eight hours and I'd know there was an update but my lovely phone and its lovely data plan couldn't handle MSPA (also no phones allowed during work) so on breaks I'd see how many replies there were to this thread and guess how awful the latest update was from there. Every day was a monstrous new surprise.
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Nov 25, 2019 06:02
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Peanut Butler posted:the BGD abbreviation keeps making me think for a sec that people are talking about brian david gilbert Brian Gavid Dilbert
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Nov 25, 2019 09:03
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Can some of you who were there as murderstuck unfolded tell me what it was like as the tension built? It was really incredible - like a lot of Homestuck. Some of the things that I think it's hard for people who weren't following the comic at the time to grasp is, like: - Gamzee's widely reviled today, but at the time he was a beloved character. There was endless fanart and fanfic about this silly, gentle juggalo. Same deal with Eridan, people really dug him, although not to the same extent. - There was still a general feeling that all of the trolls had equal "protagonist" status, as denoted by their individual intros and stories in Hivebent, and that Equius, Nepeta, Eridan etc. would continue to be as important to the story as Karkat, Terezi and Kanaya. Absolutely no-one expected them to die. - Murderstuck was in some ways a clearing of the deck so that the story could move on without too many extraneous characters, but the way in which it happened was a response to the fanbase. Some fans complained that Gamzee got too little focus compared to the other trolls, and particularly that he'd never been drawn in Hero Mode like the others. Hussie reacted to this like, "oh, you want your beloved clown to be important, huh? Watch this: I'll make him important!". This is why Gamzee, while murdering Equius, is drawn in Hero Mode with the words MURDER MODE written behind him. It is a monkey's paw uncurling on the fanbase's desire to see more of their funny clown troll.
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Nov 25, 2019 10:36
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Oh, and Tavros' death in particular was a tempest of emotion. People were very invested in his storyline, and the general feeling was that he was either going to reconcile with Vriska, or somehow move past her abuse. Him instead getting murdered by her rattled a good chunk of the fanbase. People were consternated.
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Nov 25, 2019 10:39
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Android Blues posted:Oh, and Tavros' death in particular was a tempest of emotion. People were very invested in his storyline, and the general feeling was that he was either going to reconcile with Vriska, or somehow move past her abuse. Him instead getting murdered by her rattled a good chunk of the fanbase. People were consternated. Tavros particularly felt like one of the protagonist trolls, being introduced before act 5 and continuing to have relationships with the kids. Until that point Homestuck wasn't the kind of story that kills off characters. Even by the end death was a revolving door, so having a bunch of characters being Just Plain Dead, and even killed by other protagonists, was a hell of a shock.
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Nov 25, 2019 11:07
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Tenebrais posted:Tavros particularly felt like one of the protagonist trolls, being introduced before act 5 and continuing to have relationships with the kids. Yeah, like, Tavros/Karkat/Kanaya/Terezi were viewed as particularly important, and Vriska to some extent was seen as an antagonist in Tavros' story. She crippled him! She killed Aradia! Surely the hero would triumph over this awful villain! It was fascinating to watch her go from reviled, to controversial, to grudgingly beloved over the course of Act 5. Even more fascinating was that it all, thematically, made perfect sense - while at the same time being a total swerve from the typical hero's journey narrative.
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Nov 25, 2019 11:12
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Also Davetav was a big ship in that era, in part thanks to the amazing "my matrimonial furnace is hungry for coal so get loving shovelling" log.
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Nov 25, 2019 12:49
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Android Blues posted:Also Davetav was a big ship in that era, in part thanks to the amazing "my matrimonial furnace is hungry for coal so get loving shovelling" log. "we're entrenched in this bitch, you and me. welcome to 'nam. now grab my hand and shimmy your rear end off that muddy bank before charlie gets the fuckin drop"
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Nov 25, 2019 13:18
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the second half of act 5.2 and murderstuck in particular is interesting because it gets really loving dark all of a sudden, and following that live was a trip the first updates i actually showed up on the forums to comment on was the "K8ll me" sequence, which came out of left field because all the violence in the comic had been really slapstick up to that point. after that you start seeing things like Dave getting his throat cut on screen by Bec Noir, or Kanaya, a character pretty much universally beloved, getting a hole blasted in her following the live updates was an endless sequence of "oh poo poo, Oh poo poo, OH poo poo!" for a while
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Nov 25, 2019 13:25
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I started reading during the Cascade intermission so it sounds like I just missed a wild ride. One thing I can say as an archive reader of that whole deal is that it wasn't as surprising to me somehow. But also, I was not really invested in many of the trolls so it was much less intense.
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Nov 25, 2019 13:51
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GunnerJ posted:I started reading during the Cascade intermission so it sounds like I just missed a wild ride. Yeah, reading it serially (to use Hussie's parlance) you had plenty of time to grow attached to the trolls as characters. Plus, the fandom was thriving, so there was art and fanfic and theories about all of them, too.
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Nov 25, 2019 14:34
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The Cascade megapause was a wild time. Roughly two months without updates, it was Homestuck’s first big pause. And it was on a cliffhanger for Act 5, which was a massive Act compared to 1-4. I think this thread was locked during the pause, but other areas to chat were still super active with theories about how the Act will end, fanart, and growing excitement about the kid versions of the Guardians (I think most people by this point predicted a new session with the guardians as players). Crazy time.
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Nov 25, 2019 14:49
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I was an archive reader and it took me a moment to realize Jane wasn't literally genderbent John, hadn't really given myself time to absorb and theorize about what I had already read
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Nov 25, 2019 19:53
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Then the story came to a grinding, narrative halt for Act 6
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Nov 25, 2019 22:04
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I think it was around murderstuck that hussie fell in love with Vriska and she became the main character to the detriment of the series Imagine if hussie paid half as much attention to Jade or rose as he did Vriska
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Nov 25, 2019 23:07
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Grapplejack posted:I think it was around murderstuck that hussie fell in love with Vriska and she became the main character to the detriment of the series the period in act 5 when vriska was the co-main character with john, karkat, rose, and dave was probably the best time in the story, lmao the series imploded in act 6 when the focus shifted from the sims 4: apocalypse to melodramatic teenage relationship nonsense
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Nov 25, 2019 23:28
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Jen X posted:the period in act 5 when vriska was the co-main character with john, karkat, rose, and dave was probably the best time in the story, lmao Act 5 was packed full of melodramatic teenage relationship nonsense too, it just happened to characters that had other things to do as well.
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Nov 26, 2019 00:01
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Tenebrais posted:Act 5 was packed full of melodramatic teenage relationship nonsense too, it just happened to characters that had other things to do as well. I didn't say otherwise! That said, there was a notable drift towards narrative focus on interpersonal conflict and romantic melodrama — beyond the trolls, extending to the whole cast — and away from the worldbuilding and magical mechanics of sburb. Like, up until the end, the cast were using game objects and game mechanics to try to deal with the deleterious effects of an npc gone haywire and then, we get to act 6, all the bad guys are living beings, and more drama happens because of dirk and jake's hosed up nonsense than because, say, god dog stuffed himself into the powerball and oops the villain can now teleport
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Nov 26, 2019 00:40
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Murderstuck and act 5 in general can be summed up as a never-ending cavalcade of "You maniacs, you blew it up!" Except instead of the statue of liberty, it's everything the fans thought they knew about the characters and what was going to happen with the story.
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Nov 27, 2019 00:45
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I started reading early in Problem Sleuth, so from the start Homestuck just gradually climbed the charts of my interests until by Act 4 it was my favourite thing online, and by Act 5 an all-consuming interest. The highest update frequency stretches when you'd get new panels three times a day at the oddest times basically made it impossible to stop thinking about. If I really wanted to know what I made of Murderstuck I could go dig up my posts from that era, which I decidedly do not want to do. Anyway. Time for more posts. While it was previously established that Brain Ghost Dirk is indeed a splinter of Dirk Prime, and that said Prime Dirk - now that they're in the narratively omniscient driver's seat - probably can't be separated from BGD, I still sort of like the idea of a Dirk existing somewhere who could possibly be acting contrary to Dirk's plans. Even if it is the caricature imaginary one produced by a mindlessly optimistic friend who wants to imagine despite definitive evidence that a better Dirk is possible. (It's just Dirk Prime adopting a ghost guise to control Jake again) Honestly there's something staggering on a purely psychological level that Jake is so broken that the only way he could parse the idea of self-improvement or initiative was to embody it in the form of (one of) his abuser(s). Literally the only way Jake's brain understands how to make sense of his desire to make a difference in the world is to put words in Dirk's mouth for him to obey. Even Tavros (the troll one, not the son one) was able to throw off Vriska and go have his own Character Development Arc at some point. RIP the Tavros who finished a Character Development Arc, btw. Best Tavros.
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Nov 27, 2019 03:11
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Homestuck has often done the trick of characterizing somebody who won't get characterization via splinters of themselves, such as characterizing the batterwitch via Meenah and Lord English via Caliborn. Having Brain Ghost Dirk around might well serve the same purpose once Dirk kicks his evil plans into gear for serious and we stop getting immediate insights into his plans.
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Nov 27, 2019 03:23
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Rand Brittain posted:Homestuck has often done the trick of characterizing somebody who won't get characterization via splinters of themselves, such as characterizing the batterwitch via Meenah and Lord English via Caliborn. There's also the distinct possibility that this will be twisted to mislead the audience, giving us fake insights and leading us to conclusions about him and his goals through his proxies that just aren't true.
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Nov 27, 2019 06:43
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NewMars posted:Murderstuck and act 5 in general can be summed up as a never-ending cavalcade of "You maniacs, you blew it up!" Except instead of the statue of liberty, it's everything the fans thought they knew about the characters and what was going to happen with the story. I think it was just before that point that people (and Bladekindeyewear in particular) started positing that the trolls were destined to fill all their quadrants and achieve complete relationship equilibrium and then Murderstuck started up and they all went "Uhh.... hmmm." The biggest threads in the forums at the time were the Romspec threads (romantic speculation) so Hussie really hosed with everyone by killing half the cast.
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Nov 27, 2019 12:00
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Aradia and Tavros next week. Aradia's eyes looking very Not Dead.
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Nov 27, 2019 18:59
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Plom Bar posted:Aradia and Tavros next week. Aradia's eyes looking very Not Dead. im forecasting some spiciness for this one, folks fake edit: wait hang on if we're post revenge-cycle how is she not dead real edit: ah right, mspareader can do time shenanigans paranoid randroid fucked around with this message at 20:28 on Nov 27, 2019 |
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Nov 27, 2019 19:50
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I hope it's 0u0 aradia and not downer mage aradia
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Nov 28, 2019 23:51
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Grapplejack posted:I hope it's 0u0 aradia and not downer mage aradia You appear to be in luck! https://old.reddit.com/r/homestuck/comments/e2idbr/finally/
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Nov 29, 2019 04:15
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shes very much alive and hopefully MSPAReader can help her stay that wat
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Nov 29, 2019 06:18
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The Tavros route reminded me how much I love Kanaya.
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Dec 4, 2019 21:37
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Tavros and Aradia both have really good routes. It's gonna be a bummer when Pesterquest ends cause this is the best Homestuck stuff that has happened in years.
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Dec 5, 2019 01:26
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Tenebrais posted:The Tavros route reminded me how much I love Kanaya. Same. And how much Tavros sets my teeth on edge. Well, we have Tavros, Gamzee, and Equius done, and Eridan is an rear end in a top hat murderer, so we'll see. I loved Aradia's route. It was so sweet and weird..
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Dec 5, 2019 03:29
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Ok, I liked it, and now I need the rest. Again.
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Dec 5, 2019 06:15
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Aradia's route was loving phenomenal. And when I had the "yeah, it is" moment with the music, I just laughed. James Roach's interpretation of Aradia's character is fantastic, and I'm glad he got to spread his wings on this one.
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Dec 5, 2019 06:24
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The guy who did Tavros's route also did Jades route, they should let him write more stuff because he's really good at it.
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Dec 5, 2019 07:28
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