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Idunn posted:That said, as a new reader, I'm very surprised that so many people say things like "the beginning is boring and confusing but it gets better" to new readers. The beginning was awesome! I probably never would have bothered with it if it weren't for all the adventure game/growing-up-on-the-internet jokes, and probably never would have been able to convince anyone else to read it either. I guess nowadays people mostly get into it for the trolls and weird plot poo poo though? If you're trying to sell it as a rollercoaster of drama and winding plot twists, the opening goes out of its way to make it look like you're trying to joke someone and waste their time. I went into Homestuck knowing nothing but "hey there's this webcomic and it is kind of like Earthbound" and was sucked in immediately after the piano refrain and title flash.
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Oct 25, 2011 00:56
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It isn't mildly amusing, it is loving great. Sick of that one ad always being there. Not that any of other porn ads are better. I hope Hussie comes to his senses soon and just hosts it on multiple free download sites. It is a temporary solution for what is a temporary problem.
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Oct 25, 2011 02:16
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I am ambivalent about the way one of my predictions and favorite pieces of fanart came true. And I'm reminded of this old, nutty fandom!secret. God.  Chunky12345 posted:Free Vriska from the dream bubble tyrants Oh, don't worry, she will be back. English will go about assembling followers in the new session. Snollygoster posted:How is Kanaya a vampire Both how and for what purpose have yet to be explained.
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Oct 25, 2011 17:47
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Renaissance Robot posted:That transformation was implied to be directly as a result of the Handmaiden's (and LE's) influence, and as far as we know LE has no real presence in the kids' universe; remember that the two main signs of this are players not spawned by their session and a cueball guardian, and Earth has neither. When you scratch in pool, your opponent gets to place the cue ball anywhere he wants on the table. Sounds a little ominous how relevant that is to events in Homestuck, eh?
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Oct 26, 2011 19:49
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All the extrapolation about non-Time players coming into contact with the alpha timeline comes from beta-John in the dreambubbles, but remember that we still don't know how he died, except it was on his planet. Maybe he didn't actually die inside that timeline??? Could part of The Choice have actually made him do a similar jump to the alpha timeline like Dave and Aradia can??? Who knows.
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Oct 29, 2011 02:17
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My favorite plot device in Homestuck has to be the way most of the characters are formally introduced. You know, the pages with "Your name is JOHN EGBERT", a brief summary of the character's personality, then a sequence of pages which may be of dubious importance to the plot, but illustrate the unique ways that character will interact with their environment and future events - without the presence of other characters. They remind me of when television shows spend a whole episode fleshing out the minor characters and showing them on absurd adventures that the main characters could never go on with episodic regularity - except, taking only a little bit of your time and being more straight forward about cementing the characters. The Simpsons demonstrates it almost flawlessly with 22 Short Films About Springfield, where if it was the very first episode you saw, you could get a solid idea of just who the characters are with no more than a minute or two of screen time each. Now that may speak more towards the bizarreness of both series and their characters than their realism, but it still makes for great storytelling that sticks in the audience's mind. Take Terezi's introduction as an example. Parts of her character have already been established through talking to the kids, but Andrew has just added in something we haven't had any inkling of before, just because he thought it would be funny and in keeping with the zodiac template: an obsession with justice. Other stories might do one of two things to show such a characteristic: casually drop references to it throughout dialogue assuming the audience will eventually connect it with the character, or build it up as a major plot point as a way of giving a reason for it to exist - maybe a more dramatic reveal as a part of character development, but probably not very funny. But Hussie likes to keep the Bottom Line Up Front when it comes to writing characters, and it works for the format and moods of Homestuck. A three minute vignette on the trial of Senator Lemonsnout, and we're left with lasting impressions of Terezi's self-given title as embodiment of justice, and of her Calvin & Hobbes-esque imagination and her cruel and playful sense of humor - things which had already taken all of her dialogues with the kids just to establish a foundation of. Now of course we've been writing believable characters for hundreds of years without resorting to a kind of self-aware and meta procedure for entering them into the story, but for a media that isn't meant to be realistic, introducing characters in such a quickly encapsulating manner can work as a huge advantage for both amateur and professional writers. I can't count how many times I've scoffed at TVTropes-level fiction from people who confuse absurdity with entertainment on a directly proportional scale, and believe that casually dropping references to food or science or racism with every sentence a character says counts as endearing development. There is, maybe not a science, but at least a common sense to writing characters, and Hussie has managed to find and thoroughly exploit a common ground technique to doing so. MrBims fucked around with this message at 16:17 on Oct 30, 2011 |
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Oct 30, 2011 16:14
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The fourth prototyping added the tentacle like shapes all around the planet. Yeah, the snowflake thing.
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Oct 30, 2011 18:59
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ActionZero posted:I have never felt as much anger at a complete stranger as I experienced right there. Why the hell would you use THAT as an introduction to homestuck? The trolls don't even message any of the kids until act 3. Not to mention telling him that Sburb destroys the world. There are ways to try to introduce someone to a piece of fiction and that is NOT it.  There's nothing wrong with mentioning that it is a webcomic about the end of the world. But I'd start it more like "You know those old computer games where you would type in commands for the characters to do? Imagine if Earthbound/Zelda/Final Fantasy was like that, but with..."
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Oct 30, 2011 22:58
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WV can't be dead (at least, not permanently) because he hasn't eaten the green sun yet.
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Nov 1, 2011 03:07
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Gabriel Pope posted:Anyhow, speaking of the 8r8k h34ds code: Aradia described the full genetic code phrase as representing the sounds that would accompany "the ultimate demise of the tyrant less an arm and an eye." Could this have been referring to Doc Scratch? At the time of his "death" he was pretty tyrannical and missing an arm; I wonder if he could be said to be missing an eye in any sense. I guess the cueball he exploded in Vriska's face was kind of eyeball-like but we've never had any indication that the cueballs serve any sensory function for Scratch. The tyrant from Aradia's prophecy was Vriska. Vriska has been the only one to make the loss of an arm and eye a part of her character, as part of her way of living in the footsteps of the pirate queen. And remember all the Peter Pan allusions? The tick-tock pages that started with the alternate timeline and ended with her death - remember Tick-Tock the croc? Hussie actually edited in the crocodiles onto the clock. Dolash posted:Spades Slick might be alive! Drifting on some leftover chunk of green, ruined tower. SS: Stick your pin in the voodoo doll because gently caress this
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Nov 2, 2011 15:34
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yellowyams posted:People saying that Lord English is killing the horrorterrors should keep in mind that they are the ones who gave Dave the directions that led him and Rose to a point in time before the green sun existed and they are basically complicit in its creation for reasons that we don't know yet. I'd say it is still in contention just how much knowledge they have about the situation. They demanded Rose destroy the book that would make Bec, despite the fact that doing so had no effect on DD grabbing the copy. If they are limited to seeing events as they happen in a linear timeline and/or from a limited, physical perspective (like from Rose's point of view), then everything they have set up seems logical, including possessing Rose to go fight Jack and the Green Sun plan.
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Nov 2, 2011 18:35
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GenericOverusedName posted:Oh, right. I forgot about that. Future-Terezi (sometime after the flash, we'll see her soon) went back and told Dave to do it because it would be the big, flashing red arrow pointing her towards the kids in the first place. 413 is a significant number to her so it would be interpreted as this is important - kind of like if you went back in time and had to convince your past self it was actually you, you would talk about some event or idea that only you would know is significant to you.
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Nov 4, 2011 14:52
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Zorak posted:No. Beta John and all the Robo Aradias all died in "our" incipisphere. The other beta trolls and alternates died in beta universes. So they're still in beta dream bubbles in the beta dead end universe. YEP. While I believe it is very likely that beta-John actually came to the alpha timeline as part of The Choice, it hasn't been shown yet. We will probably get back to that 5 or 6 months down the line when Hussie realizes he is still only a quarter of the way through Act 6.
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Nov 7, 2011 01:27
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The idea of a story that starts with a bad potty humor joke being worshiped as classical literature in middle-school classrooms in the far future is... well, poo poo, I don't know how I would feel about that.
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Nov 7, 2011 01:46
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JT Jag posted:anyway look at this comic http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=005288 Captain Hook doesn't have a peg leg. Though for some reason the idea that he has an eye patch has made its way into popular culture. He does however have blue eyes, black hair and a prosthetic hand, and he stabbed Rufio through the chest.
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Nov 8, 2011 05:39
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Dmitri-9 posted:Speaking of large memos I recently reread http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=005261 and realized future Gamzee was being totally sincere because he was already moirailed but it still scared the poo poo out out of Karkat because of the typing gimmick. Look at future Gamzee's timestamp. That Karkat was a little bit after 3:14 left on the countdown.
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Nov 9, 2011 01:11
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Mazerunner posted:so in the future he'll be a better leader, one who actually is more like John I guess. What? You mean Karkat should blindly walk into everything that happens without any discretion and manage to stay alive because everyone else intervenes with some effortless escape already set up for him? Also what at Terezi vs Vriska being Karkat's fault indirectly and also a bad thing.
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Nov 9, 2011 02:53
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RickoniX posted:J won't be named Harley for the same reason John wasn't named Crocker John isn't named Crocker because Jane Crocker took the last name of her husband when they married. Grandpa was named Harley because he took the mispronounced name of their dog as his last name. Watch there somehow be an explanation why he still gets named Harley.
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Nov 11, 2011 16:20
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We had that whole wall of text saying this is what happened with the trolls and heavily implying it will happen again, and we have someone who looks exactly like young Nanna, and has all her traits that were already pounded into our head earlier (love of pranks and baking, heiress to the Crocker empire), and some people still think Scratched John is now a girl. Maybe it is wishful thinking?
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Nov 11, 2011 19:07
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I like how the flash was so cathartic and relaxed after putting the readers (both serial and archival) through such a draining sequence, and then just three pages later we are back to "oh gently caress" seeing the names Crocker and English come up. Just can't catch a break - Hussie knows too well how to roller-coast the mood.Tollymain posted:Eh, the trolls didn't turn out too badly. I mean hell, Kanaya and Terezi came out fairly okay having been in contact with Scratch. Who knows? Seeing as how Kanaya went around biting people, I'd say she is in the process of turning evil. Not there yet, just in the process. :P For whatever reason, Scratch didn't want to have much to do with Terezi, even not particularly wanting to talk to her when she was trying to do something that he was required to do anyway. That always stuck in my mind - was it because Hussie just didn't think that far ahead about Scratch manipulating all the girls, or just because Terezi is basically the most underhanded and villainous character in the story, even above Scratch, and is playing everyone for fools? MrBims fucked around with this message at 22:04 on Nov 11, 2011 |
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Nov 11, 2011 21:59
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Ghost of Starman posted:I can't remember - are blue ladies significant in any way other than being Grandpa Harley's fetish, pre-Scratch? Being a symptom of a shut-in nerd too. Hussie should have put a Mass Effect poster in the room.
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Nov 12, 2011 01:33
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Looks like they found a use for the Ultimate Alchemy.
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Nov 12, 2011 21:30
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Dolash posted:Pretty sure she still has to create them and send them back on meteors, it's just the case that we don't know what order they'll be created in or how they'll be sent back. Remember how Karkat had to create all the grubs and send them back, even though he was in a Scratched session himself? No, he's saying that the babies created in the pre-scratch session also went to the post-scratch session. Copied exactly, but landing at opposite times in both universs. Remember that the troll pre-scratch session specifically did not have the ectobiology sequence for whatever reason, yet those trolls still existed just fine - because they came from the troll post-scratch session, it appears. What happened to the trolls has happened in reverse for the humans: the trolls made themselves post-scratch, the kids made themselves pre-scratch. Both are part of the "glitch" that brings in Lord English. It has yet to be explicitly stated like this, but it is appearing to be the only possible explanation for why Hussie brought up this specific "symptom" and for why all the items John sent with the babies are appearing in the scratched universe.
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Nov 13, 2011 22:28
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Dolash posted:Right, I read that too. It is the only intuitive conclusion to draw given the evidence.
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Nov 13, 2011 23:44
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readingatwork posted:Oh poo poo! I just realized that there's a decent chance we'll get to see the troll ancestors as kids now. No? To the first part, not the second.
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Nov 14, 2011 16:55
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Happy Yeti posted:Most of those are about the Condesce being on Earth, and she was there before the scratch anyway. We may get more information on her, but the rest of the troll race doesn't necessarily have to show up. They certainly don't. The Condesce suddenly disappeared probably because she found a way to jump to the scratched universe, and has now influenced human culture to a far greater extent than was desired or necessary before. It would be very easy for a time-hopping alien with knowledge of (despite little expertise in) advanced technologies to shift humanity towards interplanetary travel or greater by our current time. The matriorb appearing in the recipe list just means that it is a component of and a result of the punch-card based alchemy, just like every other object in the whole story. And what better way to remind the audience that it exists than to teasingly and nonchalantly disregard it, like Hussie has done with almost every other plot device at some point in time?
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Nov 14, 2011 23:46
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GenericOverusedName posted:Since I seemed to miss it, how exactly did the Condesce get to Earth the first time around? You haven't missed it. Almost everything about her has been intentionally vague. Presumably, that will change before these kids get into the session.
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Nov 14, 2011 23:58
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King of Solomon posted:What on Earth gave you that idea? The fact that he spent so much time on them killing Vriska, calming Gamzee and escaping Jack and oh wait that is actually evidence the trolls aren't an afterthought. Hussie wanted to do the scratch and kid-guardian swap even before starting Act 5 Act 1, so it isn't like he has gotten bored of the surviving trolls and wants to chase this tasty carrot of four new kids instead. We will get back to the trolls soon enough. After all these kids get in their new session, probably. In five months, probably.
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Nov 15, 2011 02:19
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Citizen Rat posted:Oh, I don't know, because of the twelve we start out with only 5 of them are alive? From his 2nd formspring: Andrew Hussie posted:Are you at all hesitant about killing off character after character of the main cast? I mean, we went from 16 trolls and kids to about... What, 8? 7 if Gamzee's dead, which I'm still hoping that he isn't. You're running out of cast members, man!
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Nov 15, 2011 02:23
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haruspex posted:Has nobody mentioned that part of the background image on Jane's computer is a literal candy-corn vampire?? She's made her love of Problem Sleuth pretty obvious, I don't see what is worthy of mention about it?
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Nov 15, 2011 05:33
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Plom Bar posted:I seriously have no idea where this notion comes from. I don't know why you're responding to that quote with this, but actually, there is a lot that is very off with that assumption! I know the thread moves fast, but it boils down to two facts: 1) The ancestor trolls did not have an ectobiological origin from their own session. 2) Almost every item that John sent with the babies, including the two extra Cage bunnies who previously existed as the same bunny along different points in its history, has appeared in the scratched universe as though they came along with their associated baby. The aforementioned bunnies, the fedora, the flintlock pistols, Dream-Cal, the old Col Sassacre Book (*!!!). The only things missing are Mutie and Maplehoof, and we know Mutie has something to do with the Lalondes here. * We just learned from the pesterlog that the Sassacre book is possibly the same one that Nanna wrote in. Now how this new character would know this is up in the air, but that book specifically was carried away by Grandpa to the meteor where it went back with baby John, and was kept in Dad's safe. It is a little difficult to explain this one with just time loops!
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Nov 15, 2011 22:58
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Radiation and other members of the music team are given only vague information when Hussie wants something made. I remember him saying that all he got for Umbral Ultimatum's description was "Jade: Enter" and was left to his own imagination for it. There have been plenty of clues left behind for possibilities that have and have not actually seen the light of day, and sometimes those come unintentionally from sources outside Hussie. The art and music team members may think far ahead, and want to draw up speculation and discussion about a turn they want to see the story take, and Hussie may eventually decide to go that route - or that route may have been a very likely possibility all along. Or it may just stop with music and fanwork. We have yet to see evil green sun Vriska that Lexxy drew for Alterniabound - doesn't necessarily mean we ever will. But if she ever comes back in all black and with a green sun symbol, people will point to it as evidence of something they were predicting all along. Whether they are right or not is up to whether Hussie decides to clarify on his motivations for certain turns.
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Nov 16, 2011 05:03
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Hmmm I don't know guys, maybe Guy Fieri just happened to be a pretty good judge in this timeline!!! Yes BC owns loving everything probsbly.
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Nov 17, 2011 05:10
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Cyrai posted:It was implied at the time that the sprite evading the prototyping was because it was a mischevious harlequin. Even after they entered the Medium, it still resisted prototyping until the ashes caught it by surprise, if I remember correctly quote:The game has no explicit rule that demands something dead for prototyping. But in practice, the kernelsprite has particular attraction to the deceased or the doomed. Across every session ever played, exceptions to this pattern are extremely rare.
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Nov 17, 2011 20:47
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The songs were made waaay back when, off of the composer's 'headcanons' of the ancestors who hadn't been revealed yet. Pretty disappointing when Betty Crocker turned out to be this immortal Machiavellian dictator who doesn't give a gently caress, and her song here may as well just be a Feferi song slowed down a bit.
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Nov 18, 2011 14:45
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Have any of you ever been in a fraternity, a military, or just been friends with someone who acts and talks like Dave in real life? Not a day goes by that I don't hear gay innuendo, even from homophobic infantry NCOs from the dirty south with NOBAMA stickers on their red Ford F150. Has nothing to do with their sexuality. Hussie knows how real people talk, and that has been one of the greatest strengths of Homestuck's dialogue.
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Nov 21, 2011 20:36
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Is someone trying to drive the Hetalia advertisement off with a bid war? That slot is the only one with such a high price.
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Nov 23, 2011 21:43
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Doc Scratch did indeed say there many others like himself. Though I can see how it would be easy to interpret all the events as coming to mean there is just the one Lord English existing in this set of universes - the only LE we know of came from Doc Scratch, who was existing inside the remains of the green sun, making it look like he was the first or the only one, when his appearance there is only because the death of the troll universe was necessary for the existence of the green sun anyway. I didn't think about it until now, but we are actually unlikely to see Cal-LE again unless a new LE comes from similar origins, since the one we saw has already fulfilled everything he needed to do in a universe which is now gone. MrBims fucked around with this message at 23:46 on Nov 24, 2011 |
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Nov 24, 2011 23:43
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There is nothing in the last few pages that wasn't said thirty pages ago. All the evidence was here by the Act 6 page, and it is significantly easier to understand than some of the bigger twists. The comets were copied and rerouted to different times so that the players and their ancestors lived mirrored and different lives.
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Nov 25, 2011 16:09
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Mr. D Bewildering posted:Thinking back to the Rise Up flash, did we ever find out just how much WV knows about god tier mechanics or even the idea of dream selves? He seemed awfully distraught despite having seen John as god tier after the stabbing (e: but before his exile). Maybe he didn't recognize cause and effect, or even properly understand the order of events? The windy boy is dead. The tragedy is overwhelming. All hope is lost. Oh well. Time to get out of this tin can! His line of thinking was backwards. He saw the apprentice thief trying to steal his ring first, then saw him on the monitor years in the future, and didn't even realize they were the same boy until when he went back to talk to John while LOWAS was on fire. MrBims fucked around with this message at 04:02 on Nov 26, 2011 |
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Nov 26, 2011 03:59
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