I think reading Homestuck is bad for my blood pressure; also a brief writing report

[edenfalling]

Agh, oh god, the latest Homestuck update! (Aka, [S] Jane: Enter) Whatthefuckjusthappenedthere???

So GodCat zapped poppop's stuffed corpse away before the Auto Responder could drop it into the kernel? But that means the kernelsprite didn't get prototyped. Is that why the pre-punched card did not produce a way to enter the Medium? Why didn't the AR try again with something else? (Distracted by a Dirk-related crisis, perhaps? I though it/he could multitask better than that; wasn't that half the reason it took over as Jane's server player in the first place?) Anyway, the meteor comes in point blank, the blue tree vanishes... and boom, Jane ends up floating in a field of stars surrounded by blue glowy shit (maybe with another iteration of herself still at home facing the meteor???), her house just vanishes in another flash of blue (no meteor explosion), and the shadow of the Condesce's battleship floats overheard.

Then everything gets deeply, deeply weird. (And when I say that about Homestuck, which is already so far beyond weird that weird is not even visible on the horizon, that is pretty seriously weird.)

What I can't figure out is if somehow everything changed right then, to reflect a shift in reality, or if everything was like that all along and we've just been seeing the outside world via Jane's hypnotized view of the 'normal' world. I mean, we have seen Dirk's city, but I think whenever we've been in his POV he's been indoors. Ditto Roxy and her house and lab -- I think she's always been inside. Jake's been outside, though, and I am pretty sure the frog temple wasn't three-quarters submerged and surrounded by red spikes. I think I would have remembered that from how many times I rewatched [S] Prince of Heart: Rise up.

Also, if the changed world is "years in the future, but not many," then how and why are Dirk and Roxy still there and still apparently the same age? How badly have this game session and this universe been derailed? How are they going to deal with the approaching Imperial Drones? (Tangentially, since when can Imperial Drones fly? ETA: Nevermind on that one; they have jetpacks or something; you can see the flames shooting out from behind their hips.)

What the bleepity bleeping bleep is going on???

...

I wish I had the self-control to only read Homestuck in, say, once-a-week binges. I think it would make the cliffhangers much easier to bear, if only because I'd run into fewer of them. But no. And so this is me, swearing my way through the vagaries of serial reading.

[[ETA: For answers and discussion, please read comments on the LJ version of this post!]]

---------------

In other news, this weekend I hope to get a good start on the illustrations I owe another writer for her Narnia Big Bang story. (Yeah, I signed up to draw as well as write. At the time we seemed to be short on artists. It will be an interesting challenge!) I also hope to knock off my own NBB story for good.

And in other other news, last night I wrote about 1,400 words of a weird kinda-sorta Homestuck fantasy AU centered on Dave and Aradia as childhood best friends, and I am not going to say anything else because it would take too long to explain the concept and also I have no idea if I'll ever finish the damn thing. Mostly I started writing it because there is one particular scene I desperately need to get out of my head, but it makes no sense without a lot of context, and then its inherent nature will demand some continuation.

So yeah. That's what I've been up to.

Comments

[yggidee.livejournal.com]

My understanding, (and Tumblr's,) is that Jane and Jake are in the present, whereas Jake and Roxy are in a dystopian future ruled by the Batterwitch. The gist of it seems to have sprouted here (http://ahpoordogsbody.tumblr.com/post/17702479075/get-this), but the jury's still out on how they got there.

[edenfalling]

Aha! Suddenly everything... no, wait, bad word choice. Suddenly a lot of things make much more sense. :-)

I love how this story repays ridiculously close and careful reading. I am already seeing so much on my second read-through that I missed the first time, either because I didn't have the relevant context (and had forgotten details by the time I reached the context), or because I was just going too fast to catch the finer details.

[explodingfrogs.livejournal.com]

Basically, what seems to have happened is this:

* Godcat prevents Jane from prototyping, for inscrutable First Guardian reasons.
* Jane's entry item is a tree with no fruit. She has no idea what she's supposed to do with it.
* Something is hurtling towards her house in synch with the Cruxtruder's countdown Given past experience, we readers initially assume it's a meteor.
* Apparently, the correct thing to do with Jane's entry item is nothing at all, because she Enters with just a second left on the countdown.
* As her house vanishes into the Medium, the "meteor" is revealed to actually be the Battleship Condescension. Cue flash-forward as we see the effects of the Condesce's conquest of Earth.
* Roxy and Dirk are under attack by Imperial Drones. Based on what undyingumbrage said, this is most likely due to the recent actions of their dream selves, particularly Dirk's.

Something else about the future island: recall that it seems to be the Alpha version of the island seems to be a breeding ground for lusii. Now recall exactly which lusus has miles-long tentacles and lives deep underwater...

As far as Prototyping goes, compare the Alpha session's Prospit and Derse to those of the Beta session and the Troll session. The Alpha session versions lack Prototyping towers, implying that no player of this session will ever Prototype prior to Entering. The same goes for the Alpha Black Queen's ring (worn by the Condesce) and the Alpha White King's scepter (used by the White Queen as a bludgeon)--they don't have any Prototyping orbs.

[yggidee.livejournal.com]

...Did she enter the Medium? We've seen what it looks like normally- Equius and Jade's homes flashed white, whereas Jane's house flashed blue, as Jane herself seemed to be Doing the Life-y Thing.

[explodingfrogs.livejournal.com]

Jade's house flashed green, actually.

[yggidee.livejournal.com]

Wait, really? Shit, I thought I was on to something. Let the record show that I'm still suspicious, though.

[explodingfrogs.livejournal.com]

IIRC, whenever we've seen a player Enter, the edges of the area being transported into the Medium glow in their color, though you might be right that the center flashes white. I don't recall that, myself.

The area being transported in Jane's entry was pretty small from the perspective we saw it from; it's possible that there if there was a white flash, we wouldn't have been able to see it for the blue glow at the edges.

You're not alone in your suspicion that it's not that simple, though.

[edenfalling]

I have been going back trying to watch all the characters enter the Medium (or at least the humans; it's easier to find those flashes). And I have to tell you that no, the houses do NOT glow in their associated colors during the transition between Earth and the Incipisphere.

We do not, so far as I can tell, actually see John enter. We see the moment before his entry in [S] John: Take bite of apple and the immediate aftermath in both [S] ==> and [S] WV: Ascend, but in the former all we see is darkness closing down outside all his house's windows, and in the latter the meteor explosion blots out whatever glow may or may not appear around John and/or his house.

Rose enters in [S] Enter, and her house blanks out and glows white -- all details except the basic outline are lost -- in the second before it vanishes and the meteor strikes. I watched the flash three times and I am pretty sure there was no violet around the edges, though admittedly the white glow effect only lasts one second and there are other distracting visual effects going on at the same time.

Dave enters in [S] Descend. As with John, we don't directly see what happens to his apartment building -- just what it looked like before and what it looks like afterward on LOHAC. There is a white glow from the two impact sites where the meteor halves crash down, but that strikes me as more of a visual shorthand for 'impending explosion' than a magical transportalizer effect, particularly since the same white glow shows up for a second or two when Prospit's moon crashes into the Battlefield. The egg that is his entry item might glow orange for an instant as it starts to crack open, but that glow is restricted to the item itself; it does not spread to the surrounding area. There is no other orange or red glow that cannot be explained as fire effects.

Jade enters in [S] Jade: Enter. As with Rose, her house (and the relevant parts of her island) blank out and glow white before they are shifted into the Medium. There is a ring of spiky green fire around the outside of the whole island-and-lagoon area during that transition, but I don't think that's related to the universe switch. Instead, it is a protective barrier created by Becsprite to block out the shockwave of the meteor's destruction.

That is actually almost exactly the opposite of what happens to Jane's house: hers glows blue and is briefly surrounded by a ring of spiky white fire that perhaps contains the mysterious blue effect.

TBC, stupid comment character limits...

[edenfalling]

Anyway, Jane's entrance (or non-entrance) is weird for two main reasons. First, the four beta!kids do not get their entry items directly. Instead, the alchemiter produces an intermediate construct that then produces the item: John gets a tree that grows the apple on his pre-punched card, Rose gets a cupboard/chest that opens to dispense a bottle (tangentially, it is exactly the same as Roxy's sylladex mode), Dave gets a giant bird that lays an egg, and Jade gets a tree that produces a Bec-shaped piñata. Jane's card shows a tree and she just gets a tree. There is no intermediate step and it does not go on to produce another item. (This may be related to the lack of kernel prototyping and the lack of orbs on the Condesce's ring.)

Second, Jane seems to be in two places at once after the blue glowy thing happens, as does the Condesce's battleship (though that last may be a coincidence due to weird time shit). Jane looks up from her starry background (which, incidentally, does NOT show her house even though it ought to still be behind/around/under her, judging by all the past transitions into the Medium) and sees the ship, while at the same time she seems to still be on her balcony with the meteor/ship approaching in a ball of fire. I do not think her house went to the same place she did, if indeed it went anywhere rather than being destroyed.

Tangentially, in relation to your 'glow their own colors' theory, note that the blue shade of Jane's text (and her Lifey thing) is much lighter (and slightly greener) than the dark blue that does whatever the heck it does to her house. That blue is closer to John's blue. It's also kind of the color of Jane's kernel and pre-punched item (like Jane's color was the color of John's kernel, his apple, and Nannasprite), but I'm not sure what that means. Aside from the color symbolism, I am actually inclined to wonder if the Condesce has some kind of beam weapon on her ship that she used to vaporize Jane's house.

Even more tangentially, I noticed in [S] WV: Ascend, that post-apocalyptic beta!Earth is mostly desert -- you can tell that the Great Lakes have dried out as WV flies over the map of the continental USA, not to mention that Jade's island is now in the middle of rocky mountains rather than the ocean. Post-apocalyptic alpha!Earth, on the other hand, is flooded to the point where Houston is in the Gulf of Mexico, significant portions of Washington and upstate New York are underwater, and the volcano on Hellmurder Island (which is pretty tall!) is almost completely submerged. So did all the water from one iteration of Earth somehow get dumped onto the other? Weirder things have already jumped timelines and universes in this story!

[explodingfrogs.livejournal.com]

Well. Shows what I know!

Though the fact that the Alpha version of the volcano is still on Earth says...interesting things. See, the volcano on Jade's island isn't just a copy of her Forge in Sburb; it is her Forge. It got transferred when she Entered. If you look closely at the area around Kanaya's hive, the same is true for her; it's just that her Forge is mostly buried under the sand.

This may have something to do with the fact that Jake isn't actually a Space player, and thus may not have a Forge in his Land. Or it could be a sign that the Alpha Session is even more broken than the previous two we've seen.

(Not that that's necessarily a bad thing. It's quite possible that Rose was right when she first said that the only way to really win the game was to break it.)

[edenfalling]

It occurs to me that the Alpha session doesn't have a Space or a Time player. And the Alpha players appear not to be prototyping anything, so they can't create the useful version of the Battlefield. So how can they correct for fatal errors the way Dave and Aradia corrected their own sessions? How can their session possibly produce a new universe the way it's supposed to? Heck, how can it even produce them, since without the full version of the Battlefield you can't get the Reckoning which means their paradox clones can't get sent through the gates to Earth in the first place?

Is it possible that the Alpha session was designed all along with the idea that the Beta players would join them, bringing both their universe frog and their version of the Battlefield?

[iponly.livejournal.com]

"Is it possible that the Alpha session was designed all along with the idea that the Beta players would join them, bringing both their universe frog and their version of the Battlefield? "

I would go as far as to say it is impossible that the answer to this question is not yes.

[iponly.livejournal.com]

And also that the alpha universe itself is shaped to birth something entirely different than the usual product of the game. Doc Scratch said it was always him in a LE-marked universe, but this is a LE-marked universe with a gcat. This is something strange. >:)

[edenfalling]

Fortunately, in this story strange tends to equal interesting, at least for the readers. :-)

[edenfalling]

No, not really. Jade's house (like Rose's house, incidentally) flashed white for a moment during its transition to the Medium. I am almost completely certain that the green fire around the edge of the island was a protective barrier created by Becsprite when he destroyed the giant meteor, in order to keep out the shockwave that was engulfing the rest of Earth at the time.

See my response to explodingfrogs for tl;dr details. :-)

[yggidee.livejournal.com]

In conclusion-

Homestuck: if you aren't confused, you haven't been paying enough attention

[edenfalling]

Yeah, pretty much. *hands*

[explodingfrogs.livejournal.com]

Truer words may have been spoken, but if so, I haven't been around to hear them. Read them. Whatever.

[marici.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm on my first re-read, and some of these shots are called so far ahead it's unreal. Remember when BecNoir uses his universe killer attack, Red Miles? I just found the setup for that in 4455 -- the troll's BQ is turning the crank on Vriska's crazy to make sure she'll keep amping up the human's Jack.

http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=004455

[edenfalling]

Jack also uses Red Miles on a lesser (planetary rather than universal) scale during [S] Descend, which effectively destroys WV's attempted rebellion even before Jack goes on to shove Prospit's moon into the other side of the Battlefield. :-)

The really crazy thing is that, according to his Tumblr, Andrew Hussie doesn't keep notes about this stuff. He claims he actually does more documentation for Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff than for Homestuck. I don't know how in the world he keeps track of all his plot threads and foreshadowing in that case!

[explodingfrogs.livejournal.com]

Why would he need notes when he has an obsessive fandom going over every panel he draws with a fine-toothed comb?

He doesn't need to keep track of his foreshadowing. His fandom does a much more thorough job of that than any one man ever could.

[vehrec.livejournal.com]

So, how did you survive the Troll Invasion of 11/11/11? Where are you now laboring under the yoke of our interstellar candy-corn horned masters? Has your home been flooded by the rising ocean levels caused by the Trolls melting all the polar ice yet? Inquiring minds want to know. ;)

[edenfalling]

Considering I live about, oh, two feet above water level next to Lake Cayuga (maybe four, at maximum), I think it is pretty safe to say I got flooded out of my home. Also I bet you anything the Condesce blew up education centers early on (along with military installations, political centers, etc.), so I am probably dead that way if I didn't previously drown in my sleep. :-)

[vehrec.livejournal.com]

Probably for the best anyways-in our new hellish regime with culling centers set up in cities that haven't been flooded out, to provide the raw material for drone slurry and stuff like that, the living truly do envy the dead. And they really don't care about things like food distribution, you know?

At least I don't live in Japan. They got eaten by a tentacle monster.

[edenfalling]

They got eaten by a tentacle monster.

Ha!

[vehrec.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Gl'bgolyb is at large in the Pacific now. We've gotta deal with it. Alien conquers Earth, raises sea level so her Mom has a place to live.

[edenfalling]

This and other heartwarming stories along with your daily culling schedules on the nine o'clock news. :-)