Webcomics

(From MS Paint Adventures: Homestuck. Click for full-sized uranium shortage.)

The post that went up on Monday night/Tuesday morning was actually pretty much done last Saturday. In the week since then, enough has happened, and enough questions have been raised, that I’m actually rather interested in this act, even if Hussie is likely to resolve quite a few of the mysteries raised in pretty short order, and even if his writing in this act hasn’t quite been up to snuff (even though the clunky writing is intentional, these kids seem even more alien than the trolls).

I’m interested in whether there’s any relationship between the post-Scratch Crockercorp, the pre-Scratch Betty Crocker, and (as seems very likely) the pre-Scratch Condesce. I’m interested in to what extent this universe is lighter than we’re used to, and to what extent it’s ultimately darker, and what its ultimate relationship is to the one we’re used to. I’m even a little interested in who’s targeting Jane and why. I’m certainly interested – and this is not quite so complimentary to Hussie – in just getting to the game, or at least back to the characters we’re already familiar with.

But perhaps most of all, I’m interested in the apparent confirmation and appearance of the long-rumored fan obsession, the “thirteenth troll”.

While ultimately rooted in the zodiac, and speculated on by fans even before our proper introduction to the trolls, the existence of a thirteenth troll became ultimately rather unlikely as time went on and we learned more about the trolls, and right now I’m not sure how it’s even possible. She claims that she herself played the game, but there’s no evidence that it is possible for there to be anything other than an even number of players, indicating that whoever she is, there’s another troll that she played with. That doesn’t even address the question of what session she comes from, or what it was like; it’s very unlikely it’s one that we’re familiar with. Somehow she knows how this session will go, yet claims to have “sync[ed] Up these conversations with yoU on the same day that i begin playing as well”, or in other words, she hasn’t even played herself yet. And then there’s her association with what appears to be an exile’s terminal at the start of the act…

Then there is what she says. She refers to “the legendary octet of mUtUal progenitoriety”, and refers to the titles of the kids we’re familiar with by name, indicating that this final session will consist of not only these four post-Scratch kids, but also the four kids who have already played the game to this point. And beyond that, she also foreshadows the ending of all of Homestuck, claiming that together they will “heal a great breach in paradox space”:

UU: and while the emerald eye of this storm is fixed in the abyss forever
UU: today yoU are poised to escape its scowl once and for all.
UU: by skaias gUiding light, yoU may leave behind its tUrning arms of bright coloUrs and mayhem, and secUre peace for yoUr cosmic progeny for all dUration.

In other words, while “uranianUmbra” is rather dense with the purple prose, the gist of what will happen is clear: this unified session will ultimately break the cycle of misfortune caused by the game and the enemy, and ensure that however many universes may follow, they won’t have to go through what everyone in Homestuck has gone through. It also suggests where she herself may come from: a future session, one after everything both groups of kids achieve in this one has made them legends in every subsequent universe. (Which in turn, suggests whatever everyone does, it won’t do away with the game entirely, and her remark about the “emerald eye” suggests the Green Sun won’t actually get destroyed either.)

I’m a bit surprised, not only that Hussie would include a thirteenth troll, but that he would allow her to drop, in her words, such “casual spoilers” about what is to come in this act. He let so much information slip here that it’s not even that hard to figure out what Act 7, Homestuck‘s epilogue, is likely to consist of. If I were a betting man, I’d bet that much about UU will remain a mystery throughout Act 6, and getting a proper introduction to her, however brief, will be the ultimate goal of Act 7.

(From MS Paint Adventures: Homestuck. Click for full-sized all-purpose baking utensil.)

Homestuck has been undeniably awesome so far… but reading a recent Tumblr post of Hussie’s, it’s also exhibited an example of something not to do.

Aspiring Webcomickers Everywhere, do not bend your story just to do something you think is cool. Do a side strip, or do a non-canon intermission, or something, but if you’re doing a story-heavy comic, everything that happens in your comic should serve the needs of the story, not the other way around. And certainly don’t change the basic cornerstones of how the story goes in order to do something cool.

Hussie knows this – the Midnight Crew, the dark counterparts of the Problem Sleuthers, never appeared in PS proper, instead sticking to bonus material before becoming key figures in Homestuck – and he mentions coming up with this idea about two years ago, or almost as far back as the age of the comic itself. But two years ago, Homestuck was already in the midst of Act 3, and Hussie mentions the idea spinning out of the ectobiological origins of the kids and guardians, suggesting at least some of the comic was already established by that point.

I’m hopeful these new kids will prove to be important enough to the plot we’ve been following for the last five acts that their value will be more than just Hussie wanting to do something cool, that Hussie will prove a good enough writer to integrate them at least as seamlessly as he did the trolls – and in fact there’s evidence that Jake, who we’re meeting now, is the penpal who helped Jade make the “ultimate bunny” (but if that’s the case, why don’t I recognize his old-timey dialogue from his notes to John?) – but I’m going to be reading cautiously until then, if I decide to read at all before we get back to the plot.

(From MS Paint Adventures: Homestuck. Click for full-sized reign of the pool balls.)

So. Let’s talk about that EOA flash some more.

A single installment of a comic has to be absolutely incredible for me to devote two posts to talking about it. If anything would qualify, it would be that flash, but that’s not why I want to talk about it. Nor do I want to talk about it because of Hussie’s Halloween (sort of) surprise unveiling Lord English in full to us for the first time (after I noted his glaring absence in the EOA). Rather, I want to talk about it because arguably the most important development in that act-ending flash wasn’t conveyed clearly.

To be fair, without dialogue (and the lack of dialogue is an important part of the appeal of Homestuck‘s flashes), it may well have been impossible to convey clearly. Without dialogue, it’s impossible to tell whether Rose and Dave can’t find the Green Sun, or if it’s just obscured by the Tumor, the distance, and quite possibly being in the middle of Derse’s moon. Without dialogue, it’s impossible to tell whether that huge green orb is the Green Sun itself, or the shockwave from its destruction. It’s especially impossible to tell when Hussie intentionally structured the flash out of strict chronological order (even by Homestuck standards – for instance, that Red Miles attack of Noir’s, depicted immediately after he’s seen mourning Jade’s death and before he even places her on the Quest Bed, actually happens after everything else Noir does in that flash, aside from PM showing up), meaning Rose and Dave’s quest for the Sun was interspersed with Aradia and ghost-Sollux waiting for them outside the (existing) Sun.

I got a lot of things wrong in my initial post on the EOA, and I was okay with that. I intended that post to be my own first impressions and interpretations, largely unencumbered by what other people said about it and how other people interpreted it, and I didn’t want to bother re-editing it heavily after reading those other interpretations. In particular, my title said that I didn’t see why people were making a big deal out of Scratch’s “suckers” remark to Gamzee, and if I didn’t still think that after reading what I got wrong I would have changed the title. We already knew that Scratch’s entire MO consisted of manipulating people to serve his own ends. We already knew that Scratch was tricking Rose and others into unleashing an unstoppable universe-eating demon (an aspect of his motivation I don’t think he mentioned to anyone other than the reader and people he’d recruited to serve English directly). While we learned more about his ultimate plan, and that he committed more “lies of omission” than we had thought, I’m not sure we learned that much more about Scratch that we didn’t already know.

But the creation of the Green Sun is important to talk about, and while we can’t really do much more than speculate, we can talk a little bit about the implications, which should serve as a short prelude to the coming Act 6.

Rose’s mission to destroy the Green Sun was given to her by the horrorterrors, Lovecraftian abominations from beyond the Furthest Ring, and Doc Scratch provided her with the details to carry it out. According to their story, the Sun was the source of power for, among others, Jack Noir (and Scratch himself), and destroying it would also serve to avert their own deaths at the hands of some malevolent force. The horrorterrors gave Rose a map to plot a course through the knotted spacetime surrounding the Sun, to arrive at the Sun’s location at just the right time and place.

It now appears that the horrorterrors misled and tricked Rose and Dave into creating the Sun to serve whatever purposes they may have had, with Scratch as their accomplice. It’s anyone’s guess whether they’re actually under any kind of threat, or what their exact aims are, but it’s clear that they’ve screwed over two sessions and possibly many more, with their machinations leading fairly directly to the creation of Doc Scratch and Jack Noir’s omnipotence. Hussie calls all of act 5, and perhaps the entire comic, “the result of a very, very long con by Doc Scratch”; I might go even further. Everything that has completely screwed over the kids and trolls ultimately comes back to the deviousness of one grand enemy, one party that appears to have caused everything, of which Noir is ultimately a minor part. Whether anyone realizes the extent of their machinations remains in doubt.

It’s also clear that the kids and trolls can’t trust anyone, to any extent, except themselves and each other. Rose, with good reason, was very skeptical over whether to trust the horrorterrors, but even after the “grimdark incident” went ahead with the plan anyway, if only because there wasn’t much else to do with the Tumor. Now far from solving their myriad problems, she now bears some accidential responsibility for them, and what reason there may have been to trust that the horrorterrors have had their best interests in mind has gone out the window. Meanwhile, Doc Scratch has repeatedly said he never lies, and going back through his conversations shows that any lies he made about the nature of the Tumor, the Green Sun, and Rose’s mission were by omission, but one would have to parse his conversations very carefully to detect what he’s leaving out.

Everyone in a position to say more about the game world than any player would has proven to be utterly untrustworthy and working against them (though the two characters who inherited first-guardian power during the same flash may provide a sliver of hope). If the combined forces – soon all the surviving trolls will be joined with half the kids outside the Sun, seven in all – do realize the scope of the forces arrayed against them and start aiming to oppose them, they will effectively be flying blind, with their only source of information being the same forces they seek to oppose, which they will need to guess at when they need to do what they say, the opposite, or something else entirely.

This, then, is the central conflict of Act 6, the final substantial act: the efforts of the kids and trolls, working in complete concert for the first time, to oppose and take down their true enemy, which has started to show its face. It is far more difficult than anything the game has challenged them with to this point, with even beginning to effectively oppose them a seemingly impossible task, but one they are faced with nonetheless; only time will tell if they will succeed in accomplishing their goal, or their enemy’s. To the side, PM and perhaps eventually Jade will oppose Jack Noir, but only on the side; though the Noir ruse may prove a critical distaction, and even prevent any potential victory from proving empty, if not complete it, it is no longer the comic’s most important conflict.

But perhaps there’s an even larger story here. In one sense, the creation of the Sun completes the biggest time loop of all, with the crisis faced by the kids leading to the creation of the power behind that crisis, with Doc Scratch engineering the source of his own power. But in an even bigger sense, the Green Sun is the source of one of the most central aspects of the game itself. Perhaps, just perhaps, the greatest time loop of all hasn’t been completed yet, and will only come to fruition with the creation of the game itself.

I may be back later with thoughts on the start of Act 6.

(From MS Paint Adventures: Homestuck. Click for full-sized replacement curtains.)

Sixteen months ago, Homestuck, the current installment of MS Paint Adventures, started its fifth act. Thirteen months ago, it started the second act of that fifth act. Two months ago, MSPA went completely silent as Andrew Hussie worked on the flash to end the act, and just shy of the one-year anniversary of the start of Act 5-2, released a few extra, contentless pages to tide people over. To put all of that in perspective, Homestuck has only been going on for two and a half years, so Act 5 has taken up over half its lifespan, and Act 5-2 has come pretty close. What’s more, Act 5 has done more than that to make Homestuck what it is; it was Act 5-1 that gave us a proper introduction to the trolls, who practically define Homestuck‘s appeal at this point.

And now, after all that time, it has finally come to an end.

The end of such a momentous period in the “comic’s” history should be with a bang, and on this Hussie more than delivered, with a Flash animation so long (13 minutes) it had to be hosted on Newgrounds (which it then proceeded to crash when first uploaded), starts with a card that divides it into seven parts, can be paused (something that hasn’t happened for any previous flash), comes with its own modified site design, and eventually spills over to cover up its own title. Hussie has said in the past that he intended to keep pushing the envelope with what he could do with Homestuck, constantly trying to make it bigger, better, more spectacular, and this seems to be the sort of thing he was talking about. Rose and alternate-Vriska’s fights with Noir were originally going to be an epic Flash animation, but it took so long to put together the idea was scrapped in favor of starting the Scratch interlude early; I almost feel like this animation would feel less jarring if that animation had come to fruition. The only previous flash that would come close was the flash at the end of Act 4, and that was a long time ago.

Leading up to the flash, Hussie published a series of pages depicting Jade and Noir watching the Courtyard Droll touching down near their location and setting off a Barbasol bomb. (Turns out, stealing John’s dad’s wallet from the Wayward Vagabond without his ring or the Tumor inside was just as planned after all!) The frog tadpole they were with fell into some lava, and Jade fell to the ground, dead. Noir’s reaction is, in some sense, the culmination of a plot thread that hasn’t even been running that long. We only got a real look at Noir’s post-omnipotence mindset back in February, when we learned of his boredom with nothing to do except kill and his frustration with the dog-like thoughts Bec’s prototyping left him with, including loyalty and love towards Jade. So he tried to get his underlings to kill Jade for him. But during the Scratch interlude, he went as far as following Jade around everywhere (which did give him the opportunity to stomp on a lot of frogs), and now he gets upset and ultimately kills the Droll off-screen for following his own orders to the letter.

Noir then starts trying to destroy the universe, leaves Jade on a Quest Bed, and takes off to hide in the frog temple, where he proceeds to kill most of the Exiles. The Aimless Renegade does manage to destroy the vessels they arrived in, but gets killed before he destroys the one the Wayward Vagabond is in, though not to save his life as Noir simply pops in and rips out the uranium in his belly. Then – by all appearances – the circumstances under which Noir entered the trolls’ session prove to be very different from what most people anticipated, as Noir appears to simply put the uranium in its place and up and leave the Vagabond’s vessel, and pops up in the trolls’ session. This leaves a number of questions unanswered, foremost among them why Noir showed up in the trolls’ session, and how he showed up through what the trolls called a Scratch.

The now god-tiered Jade – whose dog ears suggest she still has everything her dreamself inherited when she was used to prototype her sprite, meaning she now has the powers of Bec plus god-tier powers and the knowledge of a Sprite, and (presumably) the omniscience that comes with combining the powers of Bec with a sentient being like Jade that Doc Scratch has shown – proceeds to shrink down and juggle the Battlefield and all four planets, keeping a promise to save all the denizens, as well as retrieve John after he completes the Scratch (which actually starts the Beat Mesa headed towards Skaia), and then forms a rectangle with her fingers, which forms a fenstrated wall that flashes images from an earlier, relatively more innocent time in the comic (the first time, surprisingly enough, I’ve ever felt the comic’s flashes were of lower image quality than its static or animated images), and at the very end of the flash, she takes the ship which John and herself are on, and literally breaks through the fourth wall, with the last image of the flash, displayed by the wall, being the very first page of the comic. (I’m a little surprised the flash doesn’t contain an Easter egg linking back to that first page; several of the normal interface links at the top do, but that seems like a bug.)

This leaves plausible a whole mess of implausible theories, including previously suggested ones, about John and Jade’s ultimate destination and Hussie’s “one yard” of direct influence (apparently shaking the life out of Scratch and creating the opportunity for Aradia’s ancestor’s attempted escape doesn’t count), including one I once read on TV Tropes that suggested they would literally land in Hussie’s back yard. More likely however, John and Jade will simply burst through the two fourth walls Hussie set up one yard apart, and likely end up somewhere near the comic’s beginning.

I also suspect we haven’t gotten the whole story as to why Noir feels “exiled” or “tricked” into the trolls’ session. The interpretation most directly suggested by the flash is that it’s a result of his shame at god-tiering Jade, but we had earlier been told that Noir destroyed the trolls’ Prospit, Derse, and all the planets to prevent the mistakes leading to his banishment; I don’t see any “outsmarting” of Noir going on that would have led to his banishment as depicted, or even anything that Noir’s biased perspective would construe as “outsmarting”; everything he does to enter the trolls’ session, he does of his own volition. That tells me either Hussie made a mistake trying to misdirect the audience, or I’ll be writing another post on it down the line. Could it be that Noir’s mistake is more specifically related to what Jade does after being god-tiered, or alternately and less likely, to leaving the Peregrine Mendicant alive (more on that in a bit)? Or could it be the destruction of the Green Sun (er, well, more on that in a bit) or the scratch, which he travelled back in time to postpone or obviate?

Meanwhile (whatever that word means in this comic), with the Draconian Dignitary killed by Dave off-screen, both Dave and Rose make their way to the Green Sun, where they find, inexplicably, two Quest Beds waiting for them (or rather, inside Derse’s moon, but the flash seems to indicate otherwise). Once deployed, the Tumor cracks open to show that it is apparently powered by the destruction of both the kids’ and trolls’ universes, and may in fact contain them. After the Green Sun is destroyed (as a sign of how confusing the flash is, apparently the intent is that the Tumor actually creates the Green Sun, but that’s hard to convey without dialogue), Dave and Rose pop out god-tiered (who wants to bet someone’s calling “deus ex machina”?) in front of Aradia and the ghost of a future-dead Sollux. After the living trolls notice the glow of the Sun’s destruction (er, creation), Sollux is shown completely freaking out with his eye sockets flashing black and white, which I actually originally interpreted as something his ghost with Aradia was doing because of the similar color scheme, but which I later realized was him living up to his ancestor’s example.

Oh, and the Peregrine Mendicant recovers the ring from the Wayward Vagabond’s corpse and is shown challenging Noir, apparently coming the same way he did, but showing up ten hours and twenty-five minutes later, and apparently bringing WV’s body with her (if you look closely). Between her and the possibility of “dog-tier” Jade joining the fight, this comic is starting to look like an episode of Dragonball Z (without, of course, the long drawn-out multi-episode fight scenes… hopefully). Seriously, three nigh-omnipotent beings?

All told, the end of Act 5 lived up to every expectation it had to to wrap up something as epic as Act 5 itself was, wrapping up most of the act’s individual plot points and completely shaking up the status quo. But it didn’t answer every question, and it raised more than a few questions of its own. One particularly glaring omission? The flash barely even hints at Lord English.