Month: November 2012

(From MS Paint Adventures: Homestuck. Click for full-sized geometric solar system.)

Yesterday marked the one-year anniversary of the start of Act 6. Perhaps nothing has best exemplified how completely superfluous the past year has been to the rest of Homestuck than whatever the hell it was that just happened.

Between the epic flash that concluded Act 5 and the start of Act 6, Andrew Hussie squeezed in a second “intermission” that was nothing more than a single flash formally introducing Lord English. Now, he’s done it again… with an actual sub-act within Act 6. To put that in perspective, we just concluded an intermission within Act 6 that lasted for about two months, introduced us to about ten new trolls, and advanced numerous plots, including the main ongoing plot. The intermission was more important than the actual act.

It would be one thing if this flash was an incredible, awesome epic advancing numerous plot threads, but despite being the fourth-longest flash in all of Homestuck, it barely advances the plot at all, having one of the lowest content-to-length ratios of any flash. (To be fair, when it comes to long low-content flashes, it’s pretty tough to top this – and I apologize in advance for the nightmares that will give you.) All it essentially does is elide a time-skip for the post-Scratch crew – implied to be nearly half a year, judging by the scratch marks on the walls of Jack Noir’s cell, if they’re taken to refer to days, which makes the first half of Act 6 all the more puzzling, as the characters are all likely to be very different and have all sorts of things happen to them that will make the numerous romantic subplots and other frivolous elements of the first three sub-acts seem all the more superfluous. The only thing that “happens” in this flash is that we’re introduced to the other three post-Scratch lands and witness the kids in action, including facing off against actual foes Jane didn’t initially encounter. (Are these re-animated salamander corpses, intended to resemble Lord English, or both?)

Since Act 6 Intermission 3 didn’t really do that much either, even by the standards of Act 6 intermissions, we haven’t really had anything that felt all that weighty since the end of Act 6 Act 3, which, because of breaks Hussie took around that time, came near the end of July, three and a half months ago, and we haven’t had a sustained period of updates with actual content since the period leading up to July 1st, four and a half months ago. To put that in perspective, the epic wait that helped build the anticipation for the end-of-act-5 flash was only two months.

It doesn’t help that by essentially skipping a sub-act (and thus a full sixth, if not fifth, of the act proper, with only one or two more sub-acts to go), we’re skipping a number of plot points most people probably expected to be resolved within it, including advancing Caliborn’s background plot (which I’m now really worried won’t be advanced beyond that end-of-act-6-act-3 flash, making it nothing more than a really convoluted, unexplained, unnecessary, and detrimental backstory for Lord English that could end up bordering as setup for a lame deus ex machina), as well as answering why and/or how Roxy blacked out the session (though admittedly, the latter does make a good in-universe explanation for the time-skip). The implied length of the time-skip effectively drops other subplots and raises questions that didn’t need to be raised, such as what happened with the other kids’ sprites (there was a fairly popular theory that Dirk’s auto-responder would end up prototyped in a sprite).

I guess this is Hussie’s way of signalling once and for all that we’re going back to the main plot now, with another intermission likely to follow to advance the plots we left off at the end of the last one, as well as further advance what’s going on on the meteor and battleship, ending with said meteor and battleship finally arriving in the session to start Act 6 Act 5. But that’s essentially going to leave just one or two sub-acts to actually have the climax and final battle, essentially rendering the first four sub-acts superfluous and effectively wasted, especially if the new kids are completely shunted to the background and rendered mostly spectators now that Calliope’s done with them, which would confirm my worst fears about the real purpose behind the past year. I should feel happy that this move to the background is happening and that the main plot’s train is fully and officially leaving the station, but this only underscores the fact that it stayed too long in the station to begin with.

(From MS Paint Adventures: Homestuck. Click for full-sized one ring to rule them all.)

Something’s been very odd about the recently-completed intermission; so much of its content was concentrated in three non-flashes that it’s felt unnaturally short, and I felt like we spent almost no time with the meteor crew, with Karkat and Terezi only making appearances in those flashes where the meteor crew wasn’t even the focus. And yet, it’s left me feeling as optimistic as I’ve ever been about the direction of the comic.

Nearly a year ago, on the heels of the undisputed most dramatic moment in Homestuck history, Andrew Hussie ground the plot to a halt to introduce us to four new players, shunting virtually any appearances of the four original kids, or the twelve trolls that had supplanted them as the most popular characters in the comic, to intermissions within Act 6. And no matter how much what we were witnessing might have been relevant to the big picture, I and I suspect many others just wondered when we were going to return to the characters we came to Homestuck for, when the plot was actually going to ramp back into gear and get moving.

Hussie had done this before; the proper introduction of the trolls in Act 5-1 came on the heels of the previous most dramatic moment in Homestuck history, right as, as I mentioned in my original review, the plot was finally starting to get interesting. But the trolls didn’t disappoint, turning out to be perhaps the most interesting characters in the comic, as opposed to the cyphers that were the four original kids. But the post-Scratch kids were almost just the opposite. Oh, they were interesting in their own way, especially Roxy’s alchoholism and Jake’s zest for adventure, but we hadn’t spent two-thirds of the comic’s total run time (including unreleased pages) on them the way we had with the pre-Scratch kids and trolls, and the new kids weren’t anywhere near interesting enough to overcome that, especially given my suspicion that they will all be shunted to the background or killed once the real heroes come back. Those brief glimpses we got of the kids and trolls only underscored how little we were invested in the new characters.

But now… now I finally feel like we’re picking up the main plot where we left it off at the end of Act 5, and after going off track for so long, we’re now starting to become laser-focused on the end of the comic. Just in the opening non-flash, we see that the incident at the end of the last sub-act has turned on the crew on the meteor to who Lord English is and the threat he poses, as well as get what amounts to confirmation that yes, Caliborn is in fact a young Lord English. (I hope the only reason for that wasn’t to set up the use of Calliope as the method of defeating him, because if so Hussie went so all-out in doing so he may have actually weakened Lord English as a villain.)

Over the course of the act, three ghost-troll plans arise for taking him out: Aranea’s plan to find Calliope’s ghost (which, given what we know, makes very little sense to me), Meenah’s plan to raise an army to go after Lord English directly (which is probably how the pre-Scratch trolls, and some of the post-Scratch ones, will all be unceremoniously disposed of), and Vriska’s plan to find some sort of MacGuffin that can defeat him somehow. They aren’t mutually exclusive, and Vriska suggests they might actually be working in concert even as they largely ignore one another, while the end of the “ministrife” flash, while not resolving its own conflict, suggests they might end up working a little closer than that, though Vriska seems to want to use Meenah’s army as little more than a pack of redshirts to light the way to her MacGuffin.

(By the way, with all apologies to Dave Strider, I think Meenah had already replaced him as my favorite character in Homestuck even before this intermission made her a lot more sympathetic.)

We’ve spent three sub-acts and the better part of a year focused on what has amounted to a sidetrack, but now the end goal of all of Homestuck has come into laser focus, with Lord English taking center stage as its main villain and the efforts of all the characters focused on defeating him. In this intermission, we’ve seen what the plans of the ghost trolls are, but they will still amount to a sidetrack and at best support for the real heroes. The bigger development on the horizon is the impending arrival of the kids we’ve come to know and love into the post-Scratch session sometime within the next sub-act. Once that happens, it’ll be nothing but full-speed ahead right to Homestuck‘s climax, on as many tracks as possible, no matter how circuitous the route we took to get to this point. Hopefully it won’t be the long, drawn-out, tedious battle the climax of Problem Sleuth turned out to be.