Homestuck update, eeeeee!!!
Jul. 28th, 2012 10:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
edenfallingAaaaaaaaaaaah, end of A6A3 flash! Hussie, you absolute bastard!!!
Where to even start?
Well, to start with it is now canon that uu becomes Lord English. Not that this was really in doubt before, but here we see uu gnaw off his own leg (source of LE's peg leg), lose a tooth in the process (source of LE's gold fang), and use an assault rifle/pimp cane as a weapon (which is pretty much what LE uses, only in different colors). We also see LE use what I am pretty sure is Calliope's wand/pistol. So yeah, they are the same person.
I am curious why he used his sister's wand to destroy the dreambubble instead of his own Green Sun cane thingy. Can he somehow access her Space player powers when he uses her equipment? What exactly IS he doing when he kills the dead alternate (or not alternate?) trolls and humans? It looks like he's frying them with an energy beam -- they blacken, then their flesh disintegrates from around their bones, and then their bones crumble. How is that a Time player power? Is it just increasing the process of decay to ludicrous speed? Or is something else involved?
Tumblr informs me that the ~U on the cruxtruder is a reference to a kind of computer code specifying the destruction of "U" -- and in Homestuck, "U" generally means a universe. So uu's entry to the Medium happens when his universe dies... and said condition is promptly fulfilled when the kernelsprite (which is flashing between red and green in apparent distress, probably because Calliope is not also an active player) turns into a black hole, holy jegus fuck. How many destroyed universes have we seen now? The trolls' (at least once, in the post-Scratch iteration), the humans' (twice!), and now the cherubs'. Which can't be the same as the humans', despite the jpeg artifacts hinting that Dave was stuck there at some point, because all iterations of the humans' universe go boom around the same relative time courtesy of Jack Noir's attack on Bilious Slick.
I am very curious what Lord English is doing. First we see his Cairo Overcoat/Sarcophagus thingy floating between the Act gears-with-curtains (probably leaving Andrew Hussie's "house" after shooting him), then spirographing away to float through the Furthest Ring, then entering a dreambubble, which alters to reflect his life (the Felt Mansion, a Time player quest bed), and then destroying the dreambubble and all its inhabitants. The destruction itself is weird. It looks almost like the effect that created the Green Sun, but instead of drawing in and exploding back outward, the bubble draws in and then shatters. Literally -- it looks like shattered glass, as if reality itself buckled and cracked under impact. We know something or someone is killing horrorterrors, but how exactly does the destruction of a dreambubble affect them? Are they injured by the shards? There seem to be injured tentacles bleeding purple on the edges of the frame when PM and Jack are looking at the destruction... *ponders*
Other things, other things...
Okay, uu's name is Caliborn. This makes me immediately think of A) Caliban, from The Tempest, and B) Caliburn, which is an archaic name for Excalibur, King Arthur's sword. Caliban is probably a base for some of Caliborn's personality, but I'm not sure what Caliburn has to do with anything... except we know the Royal Deringer (and Caledscratch) are based on a sword named Caledfwlch, and the flash is very insistent that Dave watches the destruction of the dreambubble, while standing on top of a meteor lab tower that is a dead ringer for the tower Caliborn and Calliope live in. Also, recall the presence of Dave's terrible jpeg sense of humor on the cherubs' planet. Clearly something is significant about all that. Weird Time Shit (TM) is doubtless involved.
Also! Jack Noir and PM stopped fighting when they ran across the shattered dreambubble. This interests me, because neither of them is a static archetype, like a lot of other game constructs. They learn, they grow, and they change. If they start working together, things could get very interesting very fast.
So those are my thoughts, superficial though they are. What are yours?
Where to even start?
Well, to start with it is now canon that uu becomes Lord English. Not that this was really in doubt before, but here we see uu gnaw off his own leg (source of LE's peg leg), lose a tooth in the process (source of LE's gold fang), and use an assault rifle/pimp cane as a weapon (which is pretty much what LE uses, only in different colors). We also see LE use what I am pretty sure is Calliope's wand/pistol. So yeah, they are the same person.
I am curious why he used his sister's wand to destroy the dreambubble instead of his own Green Sun cane thingy. Can he somehow access her Space player powers when he uses her equipment? What exactly IS he doing when he kills the dead alternate (or not alternate?) trolls and humans? It looks like he's frying them with an energy beam -- they blacken, then their flesh disintegrates from around their bones, and then their bones crumble. How is that a Time player power? Is it just increasing the process of decay to ludicrous speed? Or is something else involved?
Tumblr informs me that the ~U on the cruxtruder is a reference to a kind of computer code specifying the destruction of "U" -- and in Homestuck, "U" generally means a universe. So uu's entry to the Medium happens when his universe dies... and said condition is promptly fulfilled when the kernelsprite (which is flashing between red and green in apparent distress, probably because Calliope is not also an active player) turns into a black hole, holy jegus fuck. How many destroyed universes have we seen now? The trolls' (at least once, in the post-Scratch iteration), the humans' (twice!), and now the cherubs'. Which can't be the same as the humans', despite the jpeg artifacts hinting that Dave was stuck there at some point, because all iterations of the humans' universe go boom around the same relative time courtesy of Jack Noir's attack on Bilious Slick.
I am very curious what Lord English is doing. First we see his Cairo Overcoat/Sarcophagus thingy floating between the Act gears-with-curtains (probably leaving Andrew Hussie's "house" after shooting him), then spirographing away to float through the Furthest Ring, then entering a dreambubble, which alters to reflect his life (the Felt Mansion, a Time player quest bed), and then destroying the dreambubble and all its inhabitants. The destruction itself is weird. It looks almost like the effect that created the Green Sun, but instead of drawing in and exploding back outward, the bubble draws in and then shatters. Literally -- it looks like shattered glass, as if reality itself buckled and cracked under impact. We know something or someone is killing horrorterrors, but how exactly does the destruction of a dreambubble affect them? Are they injured by the shards? There seem to be injured tentacles bleeding purple on the edges of the frame when PM and Jack are looking at the destruction... *ponders*
Other things, other things...
Okay, uu's name is Caliborn. This makes me immediately think of A) Caliban, from The Tempest, and B) Caliburn, which is an archaic name for Excalibur, King Arthur's sword. Caliban is probably a base for some of Caliborn's personality, but I'm not sure what Caliburn has to do with anything... except we know the Royal Deringer (and Caledscratch) are based on a sword named Caledfwlch, and the flash is very insistent that Dave watches the destruction of the dreambubble, while standing on top of a meteor lab tower that is a dead ringer for the tower Caliborn and Calliope live in. Also, recall the presence of Dave's terrible jpeg sense of humor on the cherubs' planet. Clearly something is significant about all that. Weird Time Shit (TM) is doubtless involved.
Also! Jack Noir and PM stopped fighting when they ran across the shattered dreambubble. This interests me, because neither of them is a static archetype, like a lot of other game constructs. They learn, they grow, and they change. If they start working together, things could get very interesting very fast.
So those are my thoughts, superficial though they are. What are yours?
(no subject)
Date: 2012-07-29 10:31 pm (UTC)You may well also be right about the dreambubble. I kinda hate trying to interpret the animations sometimes, I'm not sure if I'm just not good at it or if Hussie is just not as good at conveying things textlessly as he thinks.
I mean that Caliborn has seemed kinda pathetic and incompetent up until this animation. There's the drawing, but also the occasional comedic misspeaking (e.g., when he revealed his attraction to Calliope to Dirk via Freudian slip), the thinking he's being totally badass and evil when he's really not (the chess game with Calliope, getting Dirk to draw him "porn"), and his gloating over the alpha kids' "deaths" when it was in at least some cases pretty evident that they weren't nearly down for the count yet. Of course, in reality it's pretty obvious that he is quite competent, and anyone who expected otherwise hasn't been reading very long seeing as John is about the only major character who isn't at least significantly different than the first impression they give. It's also entirely possible (well, probable) that Caliborn is LE, it's just that I can't put it past Hussie to surprise us again, just because it is so obvious to long-time readers that Caliborn should turn out to be Lord English. I know I'm probably just overthinking this.