Webcomics

Some brief words of disappointment

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This is shaping up to be an unproductive week in an unproductive summer.

It already didn’t help that I became obsessed with a fantasy football draft, but over the weekend I found myself getting hooked on the Comics Curmudgeon. I’d heard of it and from it many times before, but it took discovering its per-comic archives to enrapture me in its self-consistent jokes.

I briefly considered a streak-filling webcomics post, but I couldn’t decide which comic touching on academic themes I’m interested in to review, xkcd or SMBC.

I hope to have a webcomic blog review by the end of the week, but I’m not terribly confident about it.

See, if this were Order of the Stick, I’d know all the points I’d need to make by heart and wouldn’t need to re-read the whole thing.

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(From Gunnerkrigg Court. Click for full-sized homework assignment.)

Remember when I did my original review of Gunnerkrigg Court, and talked about how a major theme of the comic was the conflict between magic and technology? Well, Tom Siddell is turning that theme completely on its head.

When we started a chapter entitled “The Great Secret”, I honestly expected the secret in question to turn out not to be so great. Siddell has shown in the past that he’s not above setting high expectations for a chapter only for it to turn out to be a shaggy dog story – though he’s also done just the opposite; a chapter depicting the formation of the Court had a cover page that made it look like another frivolous holodeck simulation chapter. In this case, I was proven dead wrong; we’re learning things that force us to rethink the entire comic. This post is going to be far short of what it could be; to do this chapter justice would require me to reread the entire comic, and I don’t have time for that, even considering how relatively short Gunnerkrigg Court is.

For Coyote, the mind of man is forever restless, never able to see things as they actually are. This isn’t a new concept to the Court, but to this point it has generally been used to explain the Court’s stance towards magic: a firm belief in Clarke’s Third Law, that everything that appears to be “magical” must have a scientific explanation, not realizing that maybe magic actually exists and all the weird phenomena in the comic just is that way. Siddell is now using it for the opposite purpose: that man is responsible for the existence of magical phenomena in the first place. To use Coyote’s example, a man doomed to die in the desert and have his corpse feasted on by a real coyote does not see an animal like himself driven to survive and opportunistically preying on his misfortune, but the power of a god that has actively decided his fate. When a man dies, the contents of his mind are absorbed into the “ether”, a concept that has appeared in the comic before as the source of its magic, and from that all the ideas in his mind bear fruit. Coyote himself is but a “being of the thoughts of man”; the content of the secret itself, in the single page in which he utters it, is “I do not exist!”

This gets to the heart of the conflict between the Court and the world of magic; we see the roots of the split between the Court and the forest in the same process by which Coyote describes his own creation, while the main driver behind Coyote’s actions appears to have been protecting the secret more than anything else. The pretense for Antimony’s visit to the forest in this chapter is that Coyote is bored and wants Antimony to tell him stories – about himself, something you would not normally expect him to need to do, but which ends up making a lot more sense when Coyote reveals his secret: the more stories about how great and powerful he is there are, the more great and powerful he actually is, or at least will ultimately be. Coyote is worried that the Court will either take control of the process described in this chapter, or cut off the flow of stories entirely with rational explanations, either way cutting off his power but benefiting mankind, freeing him from his own unconscious creations, while vindicating Antimony’s position as explained in my original review.

Robert A. “Tangents” Howard has been waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the comic to give us a reason to sympathize with the Court and what it sees in the forest for it to fear, and that may finally be happening, though not in the way he had in mind. Coyote once called the Court “man’s endeavour to become God“, and while we’re now starting to see what he meant by that, from man’s perspective it’s really more like a modern Prometheus. The comic becomes less about the conflict between magic and technology and more of a parable of man’s conquest of nature with science, as well as (like Homestuck) a commentary on the importance of story. Suddenly the imagination of man becomes the biggest weapon in the fight between the Court and the world of magic – indeed it’s no longer a sure thing that the comic is building to a fight in the normal sense.

To this point, while I have found Gunnerkrigg Court interesting, I haven’t found it any sort of literary masterpiece. But while my original thoughts on the comic’s entertainment value are unchanged, I now wonder if it might have just as much literary merit as Order of the Stick. If it weren’t for the fact that Antimony is in the middle of the third of five years at the Court, I’d think Siddell was starting to build to the end of the comic; as is, I’m now very interested in seeing what direction he goes with this, and I may want to take notes from the Court for my own future webcomic I’m working on. The comic’s direction has now changed course considerably.

What a time for the RSS feed to stop working.

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(From Questionable Content. Click for full-sized sober confessions.)

This comic really says a lot about where both Tai and Dora are right now.

I have to say I’m kind of shocked by Tai’s actions here. At least her conversation with Dora the previous night happened while she was drunk, and it’s made clear that at least when she woke up, she would have much rather forgotten about it. Yet not only does she have the confidence to come forth with her feelings while sober, she actually demands that Dora not string her along and give her an answer now, despite waiting for pretty much her entire time as a member of the cast. Of course, Marten gave her the green light to pursue Dora earlier in the night, but it’s apparent that at some point in the day, perhaps after Emily spilled the beans about Marten’s conversation with Dora, she must have had some sort of epiphany, that if she wants something she should simply go out and get it. It also makes what I said originally about her demeanor all the more interesting.

As for Dora, she hasn’t been the most forthcoming on where her thoughts are, aside from her being conflicted about it, and thus I still don’t know how much she knew about Tai’s crush beforehand. Faye badgers her about her feelings despite not getting any on-panel hints that anything happened at all; it’s suggested that she thinks Dora already had a crush on Tai of her own.

Re-reading Dora’s conversations with Faye and Marten, I can’t help but wonder how much of what’s been going through Dora’s mind is less about Tai’s confession itself and more about the possibility that Faye might be right, that the blush in the last panel of their previous conversation was the equivalent of the little pink hearts floating up in The Sims games. Marten explains that for her to accept Tai’s advances just because they’re there “wouldn’t be fair to her.” So now, Tai puts her on the spot and effectively forces her to decide not merely whether she’s willing to return the favor, but whether she actually reciprocates her feelings.

The result is that this is a bit better played and a little more organic than how Dora and Marten got together, and more than a little reminiscent of how Haley and Elan got together – and when I’m comparing you favorably to Order of the Stick, you’re doing something right. On the other hand, I can’t help but wonder where the comic goes from here and what Jeph has in mind for this relationship, if anything. Dora told Marten not to say anything to Tai about their conversation to allow her to sort her own feelings out, but Tai ignored Marten’s admonition to that effect when running out to confront Dora, so I can’t help but wonder if Dora will spend the whole thing wondering how sincere she is in the relationship, and that if and when it ends, it’s going to wreck Dora’s confidence in her ability to have a relationship even more.

I may be missing some things again, but I don’t see how one draws the conclusions I read. I mean, I know what they refer to, but I don’t know how you know what they are, and at least one is just plain wrong.

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(From MS Paint Adventures: Homestuck. Click for full-sized black hole accretion.)

As it turned out, not even the entry of Jake, Roxy, or Dirk into the medium was going to be saved for the end-of-sub-act flash (nor was it necessary for Roxy or Dirk to return to the future and actually be present for their own entry into the medium, which Dirk’s robots Sawtooth and Squarewave chaperoned instead), with those events instead being handled in a series of updates released shortly after Hussie’s trip to Comic-Con.

What was big enough for the end-of-act flash? The full reveal of Calliope’s brother, taking a back seat (to the point that his name, Caliborn, is almost casually dropped in the command) to his escape and entry into the medium. He apparently stays in the sarswapagus long enough that his red spiral fills up to become a red disc (though the exact cause isn’t clear), then gets up, unlocks his own shackle, and proceeds to gnaw his own leg off to be rid of the other shackle, casting a rather Lord English-esque silhouette in the process. As much as it’s been hinted before, that all but admits that Caliborn is, in fact, a young Lord English by explaining much about his appearance, even the tooth he spits out afterwards. We then see that his cruxtruder is showing “~U” rather than an actual time, and his kernelsprite apparently turns into a black hole that sucks up his house, the Statues of Liberty, even the planet itself; it might be the same black hole that appears at the end of the flash (in the image above), leaching away material from the red supergiant the cherubs’ planet was orbiting.

What’s that? As much as you understand it, you don’t think that outweighs the deaths of the protagonists or their entry into the medium as candidates for the end-of-act flash? Oh, I forgot the part with Lord English himself, where he utterly destroys a dream bubble and everything in it. Or the part where Jack Noir and the Peregrine Mendicant apparently stop fighting upon reaching the scene of the crime… including, apparently, some maimed horrorterrors. (If the black hole at the end of the flash is the one Caliborn left behind, what, exactly, are they reacting to? The remnant of the explosion, the maimed horrorterrors, something else?) In the end, this flash might be the most dramatic flash we’ve had so far that didn’t end Acts 4 or 5.

But more than that, I feel more than ever like we’re actually getting back to the actual plot. This flash focuses away from all the new characters and squarely on Lord English (even Caliborn ultimately serves the purpose of illuminating the similarities between him and English); it fully establishes the threat that Lord English presents and sets him up as the main villain of the rest of the comic, utterly overshadowing the Condesce, Jack Noir, the horrorterrors, and everything else. With Hussie promising a third intermission after this next break, the focus is about to move back to the main, established cast and their race to stop Lord English and put a stop to his threat for good – possibly with help from the comic’s other villains. If Lord English is the force that’s killing them, I actually suspect it’s doubtful that the horrorterrors were working in cahoots with Doc Scratch after all, but accidentially misled Rose into creating the Green Sun, perhaps because Doc Scratch perverted their intent or orders. The other case is if the Green Sun plays a key role in English’s defeat, whether because of the presence of PM, Jade, or even Jack Noir, or for some other reason; contrast the Green Sun with the red giant the cherubs’ planet orbited and that we see at the end of the flash.

On the other hand, given this circumstance I’m not sure I like the notion of Caliborn being a young Lord English. Even though he is an unredeemable asshole, it seems like it might humanize him too much, given his status as an utterly implacable villain above all villains, who even the comic’s resident Lovecraftian abominations fear.

Wha… what’s this? It’s… could it be? …an ORDER OF THE STICK post! Oh, joy!

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(From The Order of the Stick. Click for full-sized light amongst the darkness.)

Rich Burlew’s time has been somewhat monopolized by fulfillment from the Kickstarter, so the comic itself has actually slowed down considerably since the Kickstarter wrapped up back in February.

That’s not to say that things haven’t happened in that time. In fact, we got a whole fight scene between the OOTS and the new Linear Guild, with Tarquin trying and failing to pretend to be Thog. We even got at least one funny moment when Roy caught on to the ruse and removed “Thog”‘s helmet – only to reveal a mask with “Nope!” written on it. But there hasn’t been anything that I’ve actually felt the need to post on.

So why am I posting about it now? Only to note the change of pace we’re seeing with the focus on the Linear Guild, with the trap the Order has laid for them revealed from their eyes. I don’t think there has ever been a point when we’ve been at this level of remove from the OOTS, with another group of characters (let alone the group they’re fighting) becoming the viewpoint characters and the OOTS becoming the “other”. Rich has always had very well fleshed out villains, but the Guild is basically serving as shadow protagonists at the moment.

Part of this reflects the interesting interpersonal dynamic amongst the marriage of convenience that makes up this version of the Linear Guild, especially the surprising conflict between Tarquin and Malack, which has overshadowed any question of the chain of command. The two of them have been together since their adventuring days before Nale was even born, but Malack was never particularly willing to team up with the murderer of his kids for any reason, and he’s started to clash with Tarquin over his disregard for efficiency in favor of drama, stretching out the first round with the OOTS and disregarding the loss of some of the reanimated former minions of Girard to the same trap Vaarsuvius fell into. Malack has always seemed more noble than Tarquin or the rest of the Guild, but now I seriously have to wonder if he’ll eventually turn on the group.

A bigger part of the perspective flip, of course, is to allow the OOTS to look halfway competent for once…

More on the Penny Arcade Kickstarter

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It’s late, and the next part of the #OccupyTea series is substantially far away from completion and is probably going to undergo substantial revision before it goes up, so I want to say a little more about the Penny Arcade Kickstarter. I’ll probably have a more complete takedown later, but right now I want to tackle the way the PA guys are positioning this, that “rather than work for advertisers, we want to work for you”. Evidently, Gabe and Tycho would rather not be employing an ad sales staff and meeting the content needs of advertisers, and would rather devote the time and money currently going towards advertising towards creating new and better content instead.

This strikes me as a really, really, really, really weak argument, and it further weakens the notion that this represents any sort of breakthrough for other webcomics artists. Perhaps the PA guys have run the numbers and decided that having a dedicated ad sales team and personal relationships with advertisers would, even after considering the cost of said team, pay substantially more than Google or Project Wonderful ads to justify the expense in time, money, and integrity (assuming PA actually does lose any artistic or editorial integrity) over simply slapping on ads and passively monitoring whatever shows up on them. Even if so, would PA, one of if not the most popular webcomics on the Internet, actually still lose the ability to do all the things they want to do as a result of the Kickstarter by switching to Google or Project Wonderful, or some other such ad service? And considering that the vast majority of webcomics already use such services and so avoid the problems Gabe and Tycho want to avoid, would they actually gain anything from PA‘s success?

I don’t mean to denigrate a group of creators that understand how the Internet works a lot better than most big media corporations, with or without the Kickstarter. If PA can convince those big media corporations to embrace the Internet as well, more power to them. My worry is that what they are doing is wholly unnecessary and undermines other people trying to also make some money on the Internet or from Kickstarter. To the people Robert Khoo says come up to him and ask how they can support PA when they block ads and don’t buy merchandise, I say, “Penny Arcade runs one of the biggest entertainment and gaming expos on the planet. They don’t need your support. Instead, give your money to someone else who’s operating off the same basic model but doesn’t have PA‘s wild success.”

(And turn off your damn Adblock. Adblock should default to off with a blacklist for sites with bad ads, not default to on with a whitelist for sites with good ads.)

This is what I get for knocking out a post too hastily before I’d even really begun checking RSS feeds. I have to cheat and use the lack of guest comic on the RSS feed as an excuse to thumbnail the previous comic.

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(From Questionable Content. Click for full-sized pep talk.)

Something’s been a little… off with the much-teased potential relationship between Tai and Dora. Tai’s had a crush on Dora for some time, and a pairing between them seemed to be a natural result of the end of the relationship between Marten and Dora, one Jeph Jacques has gleefully exploited, especially recently. Of course, Dora wasn’t exactly ready to dip back into the dating pool right away, early attempt to do exactly that notwithstanding, but considering how slowly time passes in QC it wasn’t something Jeph could keep putting off forever. The post-breakup period is now almost 20% of the comic’s existence. That’s nearly a full fifth.

But I feel like there’s a few things wrong with this comic and the build-up to it. For one, I’m not sure how much Dora knew or at least suspected of Tai’s crush before this point, considering she was dropping hints to her two years ago (well before the breakup), and especially considering the comments Marten and Faye were leaving her in the previous comic. I can’t help but wonder whether her reaction is supposed to be to Tai’s confession at the end of her statement, or to the content of everything else she says. (Or perhaps even to Tai herself.)

I also find Tai’s general behavior throughout this in-comic day, while potentially an interesting point of analysis, kind of odd. Earlier, she was in full-on boss mode, tasking Marten to train the new interns and talking with him about responsibility as though she were the shop owner preparing her kids for the day she’d have to hand the keys to the shop over to them. But when Dora showed up to Marten and Faye’s place, she became a gibbering, incoherent mess. Yet now, she’s standing up and telling Dora to suck up and not angst so much, seemingly showing all the confidence in the world. Of course, she is a little tipsy, but stuff like this kind of confuses me as to what the age difference between the two actually is. (While she is a graduate student who clearly has enough experience in the library to call some of the shots, she’s still a student, and I sometimes wonder how much younger she is than the very adult Dora, and the sizable gap in height doesn’t help.)

I will admit, though, I do get a little chuckle out of Dora getting, in some sense, a taste of her own medicine.

Bleep you, Penny Arcade.

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You want us to give you a quarter of a million dollars – no, half a million dollars – no, a full million dollars just to take advertising off your site?

Why are so many webcomics people stuck in the 90s or early 2000s? What is it about people like Rich Burlew, David Morgan-Mar, and now Gabe and Tycho that make them think advertising is OMG the Ultimate Evil? Yeah, we don’t like ads on TV, and there are a lot of annoying ads on the Internet, but there are plenty of sites where ads are just part of the experience; you don’t have to accept the annoying ads if you don’t want to. And guess what: Gabe and Tycho don’t. Admittedly I don’t read PA regularly, but when I do I don’t even notice the ads.

How did this even get approved? Doesn’t Kickstarter have a thing about using their service to fund ongoing operating expenses?

The most successful webcomics creators out there are going to milk their fans of hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars just to replace one revenue stream that seems to be working pretty well for all parties concerned. If OOTS could raise one-and-a-quarter million dollars, PA could raise far more than that; it could challenge the ranks of the highest-funded projects in Kickstarter history. That’s hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars that aren’t going to projects that could actually use the money – and I doubt much of that advertising money is going to anyone else, certainly not any other independent creators. (And don’t you dare compare this to OOTS; that was a project to reprint actual books and produce actual content, a project to actually do something that could provide actual value for fans, not to stop doing something no one wanted them to stop doing to begin with.)

Nor do I buy the argument by Eric Burns(-White) that this money wouldn’t find its way to other projects. Maybe not other webcomics projects, but PA is a videogame comic. Its audience is precisely that which is most likely to fund videogame Kickstarters – hell, Gabe and Tycho have actually promoted videogame Kickstarters in the past. Nor is this going to set a precedent for future funding of webcomics, because again, this shouldn’t have been approved to begin with.

Of course PA’s legion of fans are probably going to give them all the money they want and more; hell, they might have achieved their $250,000 goal by the time you read this. But if you’re thinking of giving them money? Don’t. Instead, go out there and look for any other Kickstarter out there that could actually use your money. Any at all, any that looks like they might actually do something worthwhile with your money. I’d prefer some good came out of this whole thing if anything, as opposed to simply stroking Gabe and Tycho’s egos.

I may have more to say about this later, when Gabe and Tycho have had a chance to respond to some of the early response to this. But I’ll be honest: when I first heard about this I wondered if it was a joke. It reminds me of nothing so much as Black Hat Guy’s Kickstarter.

We interrupt our ongoing political debate for Hussie’s latest pre-break kisstravaganza.

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(From MS Paint Adventures: Homestuck. Click for full-sized party at English’s place.)

I had been holding off on writing a Homestuck post because I was waiting for all the twists and turns to finish building up to the end-of-act flash… so naturally Hussie announces there’s going to be a flash before the end-of-act flash. (I still decided to wait for that first flash – which actually turned out to be two connected flashes – to come out before writing this.)

Another reason I held off on writing anything? Despite Hussie making a habit of ending the different acts in Act 6 with hints that the post-Scratch group of kids are nothing but red herrings (great way to get people invested in the characters you’re devoting most of the act to, Hussie), I adamantly refused to believe that Hussie would kill off Jane and Roxy so cavalierly. I was confident it would prove to be a doomed timeline or something. For one thing, on top of contradicting something in the opening flash I’ll get to later, it also contradicted what Calliope repeatedly said about Roxy blacking out the session, or indeed numerous references suggesting Roxy had to enter the session, even if she died later.

So, if Calliope’s revelation isn’t big enough to end the act, and the deaths of two of the act’s protagonists isn’t big enough to end the act, what could possibly be big enough to end the act? I don’t think it’s a good place for the reveal of Calliope’s brother…

As it turned out, I was half right. Hussie wasn’t willing to kill everyone off permanently. Instead, after waking up in the same dream bubble our normal protagonists have been hanging out with Aranea and Meenah in, Dirk chucks Roxy out of the bubble towards his session (and provokes an absolutely hilarious reaction from Dave), then, after getting a wake-up from Aranea, starts setting things up for his entry into the session. He then plugs in the fenstrated wall GCat left him earlier, pops into Roxy’s house, and kiss-revives her… just in time for her dreamself to witness the knocked-out dream!Dirk and dead Jane. Yeah, that’s totally not contrived or anything.

Oh, and then he sendificates his head to the knocked-out Jake in the past.

After a tense back-and-forth where Dirk’s auto-responder messes with Jake’s head (no pun intended) by referring to himself as “Lil Hal” and twisting the knife on Jake’s uncomfortableness with kissing Dirk’s severed head, Jake eventually pulls it off and Dirk, now as his dreamself, sees Roxy’s own uncomfortableness with kissing Jane, does it himself, then loads Roxy onto his rocketboard and hops inside the temple meteor’s flower, popping out just in time to meet with Jane (who just transportalized from the Prospitian palace to the temple) and help arrange Jake’s kissing of Dirk’s head.

Although Hussie considered these two flashes to be one single flash for the purposes of his workload and the breaks he’s taking in July, from a storyline perspective I’d also join them up with the end-of-act flash (and so I could conceivably have delayed this post even more), because I don’t see what Dirk’s plan is here. Why did he have to kill himself and have Jake revive him? It helped get Jane revived, but how does he have any way of knowing that Roxy won’t be able to kiss her? (Then again, how would he know that Roxy would be in position to kiss her in the first place?) Why is he taking Roxy to the past with him? It actually seems counterproductive; don’t he and Roxy have to go back to the future in order to enter the session properly? Depending on how much he knows and where exactly she can go on the island on her own power, can’t Jane wake up Jake? I can see bits and pieces come together, but I can’t quite see the whole, which is why I don’t think the story these flashes tell will be entirely complete until the end-of-act flash comes out.

But I said I was only half-right about Hussie’s unwillingness to kill off Jane and Roxy. That’s because of the flash that opened Act 6-3, introducing Jane’s land, and the circle of lanterns therein, color-coordinated with the four post-Scratch kids, with the green one burnt out, corresponding to the earlier death of Jake’s dreamself. Near the lanterns are some tablets inscribed with this accompanying flavor text:

One by one the Nobles will arrive, and just as surely, one by one their lights will be snuffed out. In the beginning, the light of our Hope was lost. We must make do without it, and so must they. Then a mighty gust came and took the light of our Life as well, and our people knew despair like never before. But the light renewed its flicker quite spontaneously, and has been shining strong since. All in the land rejoiced.

Our lights of Heart and Void will each follow in time, long after our extinction. One will be extinguished, and then another, leaving only Life as the guiding light. But they should remain long enough to illuminate the Maid’s path, and assist her with the housekeeping we have left behind.

Well, it hasn’t exactly played out that way. Instead, Life and Void have been extinguished with Heart dimming out, then lighting up again, then being extinguished, then lighting up again so bright it exploded – all on-panel, by the way. (What was up with that, and the “Care Bear Stare” effect to start the latter flash? It’s not like Dirk’s situation is really any different from that of Roxy or Jane…) That was why I thought he would relegate this to a doomed timeline: to restore the sequence of events these tablets seemed to be foreshadowing. It wasn’t entirely out of the realm of possibility: Dirk could have travelled back in time (using some other means than what he did, of course) and not only restored the status quo ante but also mirrored the pre-Scratch Davesprite in the process.

This might seem kind of nitpicky, and a lot of people may have forgotten about those tablets (though people reading the comic all at once later won’t have), or never were that diligent about exploring every nook and cranny of the exploration flashes for flavor text. But as much as I’ve complained about Hussie pulling shocking twists on us seemingly for the sake of having a twist, this to me hints at a far deeper problem: the possibility that Hussie is setting up foreshadowing, but then making things up as he goes along anyway. Of course, it’s not exactly new that pretty much all of MSPA was made up as it went along, but Homestuck and later Problem Sleuth, by his own admission, have been increasingly preplanned with more intent to tell an actual story, and if he can ignore past foreshadowing at will just because it doesn’t fit what he wants to do now, or worse just to make his twists that much more twisty, it robs all that foreshadowing of credibility. A big part of the comic’s fandom is looking for all those little clues in every nook and cranny to make sense of Hussie’s infinitely-complex yet cohesive world, and Hussie has just raised the possibility that that may all be for naught.

Perhaps Hussie just forgot about those tablets, or perhaps he still has some plans to make them true, at least from a certain point of view. But it’s not just the tablets; remember Act 6 Intermission 2, where the scenes on-board the meteor and Jade’s battleship were preceded by “YEAR 1” graphics? That to me implied there would be another graphic for at least “YEAR 2”, which meant we would presumably get another intermission with the kids and trolls before their arrival in the session, and maybe most of Act 6-4 would pass before they’d actually arrive… then the meteor appeared inside the dream bubble with Aranea and Meenah, and the subsequent appearances of Jake, Roxy, and Dirk inside the bubble, and especially how quickly Roxy flew to the bubble and back to Derse under her own power, suggested that in fact this dream bubble is so close to the session (both temporally and spatially) that if the meteor’s arrival isn’t imminent, then Rose and Dave especially could easily cut the trip short under their own power (which could also help explain the apparent absence of the trolls in all the foreshadowing about the session), making that journey’s continuation something of an idiot plot. Time is already substantially twister in this new session than it normally is in Homestuck, but this is ridiculous.

Of course, Act 6-3 is just about over and no one has shown up yet, so it’s entirely possible if not likely we’re going to get at least that “YEAR 2” graphic during the third intermission to appear shortly… but it also feels like it’s entirely possible that the arrival of the kids and trolls is what Hussie is going to end Act 6-3 with, and it certainly feels like Hussie would have to find a way to kill a lot of time in Act 6-4 before the kids and trolls show up, which seems to be something you end an act within Act 6 with, not start one, or end an intermission that started with events a year beforehand. Perhaps he could delay the entry of Roxy and Dirk somehow or focus Act 6-4 far more on the cherubs, but it still seems difficult.

More importantly, I used to think that everything in Homestuck was building up to one grand climax, that all the pieces would fit together into a coherent whole, a premise that I suspect is at the heart of Homestuck’s popularity. But, and this is a feeling that has been increasingly building throughout Act 6, now I feel like I’m flying blind, and I can’t help but wonder whether or not Hussie is too. There doesn’t seem to be any sort of path connecting current events to the conclusion of the comic, especially with at least three whole acts within Act 6 devoted entirely to completely new characters (characters, I should point out, nowhere near as interesting as the trolls or even the pre-Scratch kids, except the cherubs, maybe Roxy, and a teensy bit of Dirk but only because he’s starting to take on some Mary Sue-ish qualities), and now I’m not sure Hussie feels the need to follow one. If Hussie can just drop anything he wants on us, it’s not going to be long before I no longer feel any reason to read the comic.

Act 6 has long been a shadow of the epicness that was Act 5-2, but Hussie now needs to pull a heck of a saving throw for the end of Act 6-3, intermission, and start of the next act to make me feel like maybe Act 6 isn’t one huge (potentially unnecessary) anticlimax, and hopefully, make me feel like I’m reading Homestuck again, as opposed to some sort of lame fanfic thereof.

Another reason to avoid TV Tropes’ Wild Mass Guessing section: it tainted my reaction (and possibly the speed with which I posted this) by keeping me focused on what ended up being one of the LESS important revelations.

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(From MS Paint Adventures: Homestuck. Click for full-sized liberated jokes.)

As it turns out, Act 6 marked the introduction of two sessions with import on the final outcome of the war, and the other one isn’t the one that has come to be called “A1”, the pre-Scratch troll session, though we have become quite acquainted with it. Rather, it’s the supposedly two-player session involving the two personages who have made contact with the kids.

The first sign of this, of course, was the cryptic panel during Dirk’s description of the rise of the Condesce depicting what appeared to be Lord English with his legs in shackles with the Ophiuchus and Serpentarius symbols on them. Recently, however, we’ve also seen actual events within their session (and their home) depicted, even though we didn’t even know their names. We’ve also learned a lot more about the relationship between them, the sort of world they live in, and the backdrop for their session.

As it turns out, the two of them are not trolls at all, but an entirely new race called cherubs. Considering some of the things Calliope has said in the past that backed up the notion of her being a troll, combined with her explanation for presenting that impression, it’s worth wondering how many of those things are still trustworthy. If they can, then cherubs have unique blood colors like trolls, with Calliope being a “lime blood” and her brother having human- and Karkat- like red blood.

What we know for certain is that, if you thought the trolls were isolated, they have nothing on cherubs, who apparently live their entire lives completely isolated from anyone else, to the point that the only other person who knows what Calliope looks like is her brother. This isolation also explains why her brother got so turned on by two humans merely touching one another when Dirk drew it for him. Although cherubs apparently do have a form of romance, they have no equivalent to human romantic love and only ever meet another cherub to mate, in a “highly confrontational and violent” fashion; my impression is that it’s probably what it would be like if humans only had “spade” relationships instead of “heart” relationships. (In addition to the clues from her brother, Calliope once told Dirk that “my species has a completely different Understanding of romance than yoU do. it woUld probably offend yoU deeply. it might even sicken yoU!”) Calliope also once told Jake, though she was still keeping up appearances of being a troll at the time, that she “never knew those who one woUld identify as my parental eqUivalents”, explaining that “oUr ancestors precede Us by millenia.”

Oh, and she also happens to bear a striking resemblance to Lord English.

Apparently they live inside a building on a meteor that’s stuck in some planet with a bunch of Statues of Liberty very near a red giant on the verge of death, which is probably what they need the game to escape from. It’s been implied they may be the only two on the entire planet, and that they have no idea who previously inhabited it (cherubs don’t even have a “home planet”), but it’s likely to be a planet long past going through the Reckoning.

According to Calliope, the two of them have been “forced” to play a game (separate from Sburb) “for as long as we’ve known each other”, a game so all-encompassing it has affected what she’s been able to say to the kids. The rules, according to her, “are complicated, and often shifting. and they don’t always make sense! at least, they woUldn’t to yoU.” Her brother takes the game so seriously he refuses to drop it even for the sake of the new game they’re taking up, to the point he hires Jack Noir to kill Calliope’s dreamself. (And somehow, the “porn” he made Dirk draw has something to do with it.)

The two are basically confined to a single room, with each being confined to a single side within that room. Each wears a shackle bearing the other’s symbol (reminiscent of that cryptic image from earlier), which only the other can remove, and each shackle is connected to some sort of block thing in each side of the room. When one of them goes to bed, they slip on the shackle removed earlier, enter a “sarswapagus”, and come out as the other. (They apparently also switch when someone utters the name of the dormant sibling, but they have agreed not to give their names away to anyone else, presumably so the woken sibling doesn’t free him- or herself of both shackles.) Much of the “game” and its “rules”, therefore, presumably consists of the agreements they’ve made to keep one party or the other from taking too much control of the aggregate. (My hunch is, most of the rest have been imposed by the brother, who certainly sees killing Calliope as his desired win condition.) There are other weird things about them, such as the “juju modus”, with which anything one of them captchalogues can only be accessed by the other.

I’m morbidly curious to know more about the nature of cherubim and how this “game” got started, and whether it’s more accurate to consider them one person with split-personality disorder or two people who happen to share a body. (Calliope once cryptically claimed “we are genetically similar, bUt in many ways qUite different.”) I get the impression that cherubs are quite different from any other race and may in fact be a part of the game. Their session, a two-player session that Calliope has admitted will actually be more like one, was already rather weird; all the depictions have some sort of dark, gray tint to them, and Skaia is completely clouded over, utterly shrouded in storm clouds, a far cry from the bright, blue place we were first introduced to. But that weirdness would be increased exponentially if the player(s) was/were from a race that never should have had the ability to play to begin with – especially one with the potential for as much power as Calliope’s brother might turn out to end up having.

Calliope’s surface resemblance to Lord English (and her outfit’s resemblance to that of Doc Scratch, and her talking as though she was British – get it?) is not the only thing linking the demon to them. There have been some pretty strong implications that her brother is, in fact, a young Lord English. Some of the earliest, subtlest signs were his repeated vows to kill not only Calliope, but the (post-Scratch) kids as well. But the hints have been piling up once we entered Calliope’s home, from his vow to “paint everything – even my words” with her (green) blood, to the white gun in her strife specibus, to the “sarswapagus”‘ resemblance to the casket Lord English travelled in. Even Calliope’s interpretation of the page in Rose’s book with Dave and Karkat’s random scrawlings, as evidence of the presence of her brother in their session, could prove to be a case of being “right for the wrong reasons”. (He has helped Dirk and told him to destroy Lil Cal, but who knows what his motivations would be there; at least part of them may be his own fear of Cal.)

If Calliope’s brother is, in fact, a young Lord English, that implies he’s probably not one of the horrorterrors, which means it’s likely that he’s the one menacing them, especially when the plot of Complacency of the Learned is taken into account. On the other hand, we have likely gained more insight into his eventual defeat as well, namely from Calliope’s admonition to Roxy to say her name to him and, hopefully, wake her up; the cryptic panel from earlier suggests that the shackles might be used to control him as well. For the first time in Act 6, I actually feel like we’re approaching the climax we’ve been building to for more than three years.