The war for TV sports supremacy, one year in

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About one year ago, the first shots were fired in the great push to dethrone ESPN from its perch as the undisputed king of the sports hill. NBC finalized its merger with Comcast, CBS removed the “College” from the CBS College Sports Network, and Fox decided it would be a good time to bring sports back to FX. While the past year has seen some high-profile contracts for them to fight over, from the Olympics to the World Cup, it’s nothing compared to the contracts coming up for bid this year, with MLB, NASCAR, the BCS, and the Big East all coming up for bid. Nonetheless, one year in, let’s take a look at how all the combatants are shaping up.

ESPN: The Worldwide Leader did a decent job defending its title, and seeing the threats on the horizon, making an enemy-of-my-enemy deal with Fox to keep NBC from picking up Pac-12 rights – though one wonders if it reconsidered that move when Fox stole the World Cup rights away from them. Other than Wimbledon, though, ESPN’s only real victories tended to be things no one cared about or things where they were the incumbent, usually with no one else caring. Probably the most notable victory other than the Pac-12 or Wimbledon involved keeping the Indy 500 on ABC rather than let the IndyCar series become an all-NBC affair. ESPN is still the king of the hill and still the ones to beat for any contract, but the fact that the biggest contract to come up for bid this year where ESPN was the incumbent other than Monday Night Football was the World Cup, which ESPN lost, could be foreboding. Grade: C.

NBC: Comcast’s efforts to dethrone ESPN from their perch is off to a rocky start, largely because of how strong Fox has come onto the scene. NBC did win the big fights over the NHL and Olympics, but they were the incumbents in both cases. They did win a slate of MLS games previously held by Fox Soccer Channel, but Fox probably feels that’s a fair trade-off for World Cup rights. They did become the beneficiary of ESPN’s decision to effectively leave the horse racing market, but they were boxed out by ESPN and Fox for Pac-12 rights and lost Wimbledon when ESPN could promise to show more matches live sooner than they could.

The Network Formerly Known as Versus did add a piece of NBC’s Olympic pie, but that will only attract viewers to the network for two weeks every two years, and they added no other games that will attract more viewers than the NHL already does. And the now-NBC Sports Network did add “NBC SportsTalk”, “NFL Turning Point”, and “Costas Tonight” to its repertoire, but the latter two shows aren’t getting any more viewers than Versus’ much-maligned “T.Ocho Show”, and “SportsTalk” is doing far worse than that. A combination of conference realignment, potential changes to the BCS, and the long-term nature of many recent contracts, means that the Big Ten in a few years will be NBC’s last best hope to add truly marquee college football to NBCSN’s slate for a long, long time, and the NFL’s decision to pull Thursday Night Football off the market hurts NBC more than anyone else, requiring them to get something on the scale of MLB or NASCAR to have any hope of challenging ESPN. Grade: C-.

Fox: NBC may have started this fight, but if anyone other than ESPN is winning it it’s definitely Fox. With three different college conferences, the UFC, and the shocker of the past year, the World Cup, Fox got right to work re-establishing sports on FX and making their networks as much of a destination for sports as anyone outside ESPN. Most notably, Fox’s family of networks is fast gaining ground on ESPN as a home for college sports. Fox doesn’t have an all-sports network like ESPN or NBCSN, but they’ve still made clear that this is going to be a three-way fight. Grade: B+.

CBS: Realizing that the CBS Sports Network is a looooong way from challenging for any serious sports rights, CBS stayed largely out of the fray, instead focusing on brands that will build an audience another way: through CBSSN’s non-game programming. To that end, adding Jim Rome to their stable was a shrewd move. The loudmouthed radio host will start a replacement for his old ESPN show “Jim Rome is Burning” on CBSSN in April, instantly bringing a sizable contingent of fans who only ever would have watched CBSSN for the occasional Mountain West or Atlantic-10 game. “ROME” should instantly become CBSSN’s most popular program, and for the moment, it certainly looks to be a faster route to relevance than picking up rights like Major League Lacrosse. Grade: C+.

Turner: Turner was making noise about adding more sports to truTV to build on their NCAA Tournament games, but their only real efforts towards that end seemed to involve the NHL. They were considered the other favorites for Thursday Night Football rights besides Comcast, and now face a very real chance of losing MLB games from TBS and NASCAR from TNT, where both packages are fairly forgotten. This year may be as critical for them as for anyone. Grade: D+.

What does it say that I originally read his threat to kill them all as a prophecy of something that will have already happened, before remembering that the original trolls’ attempt to derail events ended up contributing to them?

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

No sooner do I put up my post on the growing troll presence in this session than we get introduced to quite possibly the weirdest character ever to appear in pesterlogs, simply because of his shortened trolltag alone. I’d actually thought Hussie had created his symbol out of whole cloth, but it turns out that his symbol actually has more to do with Ophiuchus than the one we’d seen previously.

This character comes across as almost the bizarro version of the “thirteenth troll” we’d previously been introduced to, which given what she’s been like, makes him much closer to the trolls we’re already familiar with. In fact, it strikes me that the two are almost flip sides of Karkat’s personality. Karkat simply wanted to derail the kids’ session so it didn’t ruin the trolls’ own; I don’t recall him ever threatening to kill them all the way this character does, and he certainly did come to the point of assisting the kids, however begrudgingly. Giving credence to this, compare the colors of the three’s respective text.

There’s not much more to say at this point, other than that I certainly appreciate Hussie’s ability to make fun of his own long-windedness when he wants to. That’s the sort of metahumor I normally associate more with The Order of the Stick.

Would it be too much of a stretch to connect this to Penelope’s death?

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(From The Order of the Stick. Click for full-sized fatal family tree.)

The chickens, they are coming home to roost.

Much to my chagrin, Rich has once again confirmed a wild forum theory, though this one at least seemed vaguely plausible at the time. Because as it turns out, V’s pride and shortsightedness has completely screwed over the Order of the Stick, or at least the world. (For the record, it’s doubtful that the IFCC planned on this in any way.) Funnily enough, in my last OOTS post I scratched my head at V’s willingness to allow Belkar to use Yukyuk for his own purposes; perhaps this is the universe’s way of reminding her where that path leads.

If the primary theme of this book has been “family”, a secondary one might be “secrets”, namely those of Haley and her father (the latter of which I’ll talk about if and when he turns up again). Up to this point, V was probably willing to try to forget about that whole episode, and had no reason to divulge anything about it to anyone. Now, does he decide to fess up to her culpability in this matter? Doing so could sow distrust, but not doing so will cause this to haunt her for the entire battle, maybe the entire rest of the comic.

This also keeps us from meeting any former Scribblers “in the flesh” at this gate, and thus from getting any further insight into that group’s breakup, and it suggests that the reason Rich seemed to float the possibility of Girard still being alive, as unlikely as it would ordinarily seem, was to make the point hit that much harder here, the guilt weigh that much more heavily on V’s shoulders. (On the plus side, at least the illusion the Order triggered a while back turned out not to lead to any confrontation with anybody!)

Ultimately, the end result of this is to clear the battlefield, wiping out the forces that were already set up to guard the Gate, as well as most of the magical defenses surrounding it. The Gate is more vulnerable than it was ever intended to be, its only defense now consisting of the Order of the Stick themselves. The stage has been set for the showdown for the Gate, and I fully expect the first shots to be fired imminently.

I can’t help but wonder if Roxy’s had an encounter with her before…wouldn’t that explain a lot?

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(From MS Paint Adventures: Homestuck. Click for full-sized woolb-easts.)

The constant, overpowering troll presence in this session continues to get curiouser and curiouser.

We’d already been graced by the presence of the “thirteenth troll” and Roxy’s still-unexplained “wriggling day” reference, but some more surprise appearances in recent updates have made it quite apparent that the new session has their own batch of trolls to contend with. Said troll’s appearances with Dirk gave us a better glimpse at her than ever before, but that’s nothing compared to what’s happened since. First there was the appearance of not-Vriska in Jake’s dreams. Now, after God Cat causes Roxy’s fenstrated-plane connection to be cut off, we find out just where she’s connected those planes through: evidently, whatever planet these new trolls call home, where she’s accosted by someone who most definitely is not Feferi.

There’s a considerable case to be made that these are either the trolls’ ancestors in their youth, or the universe where said ancestors were the ones to play the game. This seems like too easy of an explanation, though, especially if we think this new group of trolls includes the aforementioned “thirteenth troll”; the closest existing troll she’s likely to approximate to is Karkat, but aside from the gender shift and unique typing quirk, the horn pattern is very unique. Another explanation may relate to the numerous hints in this act that Kanaya will, ultimately, be able to recreate the Matriorb and revive the troll race.

However, there are a couple of factors that lead me to question the entire nature of what we’re seeing. The first is the fact that Jake was able to see one of these new trolls by blacking out after his robo-fight (notably, after his dreamself had already been killed). The second is what Roxy saw when she successfully moved through the plane in the other direction: her own dreamself. Take these two factors together, and I can’t help but wonder if what we’re seeing is going on in the Medium, or someplace even weirder.

Of course, that raises its own questions regarding what these trolls are doing here and interacting with our heroes…

The OOTS Effect, Part II

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I’m probably going to drop the “OOTS Effect” name next week:

  • We have a new candidate for the next big thing to come out of Kickstarter: MATTER, which met its $50,000 goal within 38 hours and blew through that to $82,204 by now, becoming the second-most funded project in the history of the Publishing category, and might hold the top spot by the time you read this. It slowed down considerably upon reaching its goal and probably can’t reach a million dollars, but a quarter of a million isn’t out of the question, which would be good for the top twenty at the moment. (The same disclaimer from last week about not all projects being listed with their categories applies.)
  • The HuMn Wallet raised only half of its goal in its first 48 hours, but take a look at that end time: the creators gave themselves 40 days to get the job done, meaning if they can sustain the same momentum throughout the project (a big if), the top ten is very possible. In the last day or two, it’s blown past its goal to nearly $82,000.
  • In the end, Code Hero finished just short of the category record. On the other hand, Benign Kingdom finished with more than $13,000 more than the previous third place in the Comics category, while Erfworld Year of the Dwagon has already moved into third itself. Once it finishes, the entire top three and four of the top seven (counting the Diesel Sweeties eBook-Stravaganza) will have something to do with webcomics. The previous record for a webcomic-related project before OOTS came along, to the best of my knowledge, was Girly: The Complete Collection, at less than $30,000. Again, now you know why Rich Burlew was skeptical he’d even meet his goal.
  • Idle Thumbs has crossed the $100,000 barrier, while the Ramos alarm clock may have lost some momentum and is sitting at $93,710. It should cross $100,000 by the end of the week, but the top ten may be more questionable now.
  • Finally, we must address the strange case of A Show with Ze Frank, which blew through its $50,000 goal in seven hours, making it a very good candidate to become the next million-dollar project… if it weren’t for the fact that Mr. Frank only gave his project ten days to raise its money. It’s still got an excellent shot at the top ten if it maintains that pace, but I wonder: was he paying attention to the recent spate of wildly successful drives and decided that, with his pre-existing audience, the short time span was worth the risk?
  • Oh, and as for the OOTS drive that started it all, I got my shipping survey for that, so the first steps are being taken towards fulfiling the tens of thousands of rewards people pledged for there.

Because when I got on Twitter, I said that thoughts too long for it would go here:

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It is currently the 1 PM hour on the West Coast (4 PM ET), and Fuse is showing a “sneak peek” of the top 10 of its “Sexy Beats” countdown, with the “real” premiere coming later at 8 PM ET.

What’s crazier: that, the fact that Fuse is still advertising the “real” premiere during the “sneak peek” of the same hour that’s being advertised, or that my cable company’s guide lists the “real” premiere as “new”… and this airing as a “repeat”?

The only way this makes sense is if they hold off on revealing until the “real” premiere, but I don’t know how they could do that…

Transcending webcomics

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I wanted to follow up on something from yesterday’s post, because I was rather intrigued to find out that the Erfworld creators, having funded the creation of a motion comic for their first book, had set their sights on a far grander prize: to “turn Erfworld.com into a fiction, art, and gaming community.”

Beyond the sizable jump in ambition this goal represented, it also seemed like an odd direction to go with Erfworld, of all webcomics. Despite its origins on the same Giant in the Playground site that’s best known for The Order of the Stick, I haven’t read, um, any of Erfworld, but the impression I get is that it’s a fairly heavily story-based webcomic. Sure, there’s humor sprinkled in there, but it hardly seemed like the sort of thing that could support a community of that general an interest; it’s certainly not, say, Penny Arcade.

As it happened, a few days later PA unveiled the next step in their plan for global domination, called the “Penny Arcade Report”, which Gabe described as “what we want to see from games journalism…The PAR is focused on longer form journalism with in-depth research and interviews”, as well as links to similar journalism on other sites. Back when it was first revealed that PAR head honcho Ben Kuchera was heading to Penny Arcade, Gary “Fleen” Tyrell recalled a conversation he once had with Robert Khoo where he claimed that PA wasn’t a webcomic at all, but “a content-creating company focused on the videogame industry, with the webcomic just one part of it. Granted, the comic is the dominant part, but he didn’t commit to that always being true.” Considering that Khoo is an absolute god within webcomic circles without ever writing a line or drawing a panel and literally every webcomic creator not named David Morgan-Mar aspires to PA‘s heights of success, this seems relevant.

I once wrote a review of Penny Arcade the webcomic in which I expressed my bewilderment at its popularity. To be perfectly honest, the webcomic is mediocre at best (and the artwork has, to be honest, gotten worse since I reviewed it) and not that much better than the morass of video game webcomics aping them and Ctrl+Alt+Del. I voiced my suspicion that the comic was not actually the reason for the site’s popularity, but more the blog posts and thoughts on the game industry that occupy PA‘s actual front page. Everything I’ve learned about PA since then, especially that Tyrell/Khoo encounter, has backed up that hypothesis, and that Khoo is a mad genius who took a relatively modest webcomic about video games and turned it into a globe-spanning empire. We’re not at the point where PA the webcomic is little more than an editorial cartoon accompanying a larger Internet magazine covering the video game industry, but only for lack of content to fill it out – and the PAR is a pretty big step in that direction.

For Aspiring Webcomickers Everywhere looking for a ridiculously successful role model to follow who’s swimming in the cash their webcomic makes them, I think Penny Arcade is a bad example – unless you’re not so committed to this “webcomic” thing and more committed to this “making money off a Web site” thing. To reverse a common saying, the larger empire that PA has grown into is not a symptom of its success; rather, it literally is its success.

That brings me to Erfworld. What sort of “community” is Rob Balder trying to build? Well, it seems he wants to “completely redesign the Erfworld website to include blogs for fan art, gaming news, and sharing your game-related stories, art and video.” Balder wants the site to be “a framework for collaborating and sharing your art, writing, music, games, and other entertaining stuff, centered around the comic. Erfworld readers are smart, creative people with a lot of overlapping areas of interest….You can do at least as much to entertain each other as I can to entertain you.” There’s a lengthy document on Google Docs with more details, open to input from the fandom. Essentially, the name “Erfworld” would no longer refer to the world of the comic and would refer to the world of a miniature social network, complete with a tradable “currency”, allowing anyone to share their creative work and spotlighting the best of it.

Now, I’m not familiar with Erfworld‘s existing community and what it’s like now, but this definitely seems like Balder wants the site to transcend the comic and cater to his fans’ specific interests. Much like Penny Arcade is less a webcomic and more a video game community, Balder wants to turn Erfworld into less a webcomic and more a social network for amateur fiction and game aficianados. It’s an interesting way to re-think the concept of a webcomic: to take a webcomic that caters to a specific audience and turn it into an entire website catering to that specific audience. To think of a webcomic as one thing that goes on a website, possibly the most popular thing, possibly even the thing that everyone comes for, but for the site itself to cater to the community that forms around that comic and what they have in common. A sports webcomic becomes a community built around sports. A webcomic about toy collecting becomes a community for toy collectors. A webcomic for IT pros becomes a community of IT pros.

Now, anyone who would be depressed at what this says about the viability of webcomics themselves, as opposed to webcomics that hitch a ride to something else, need look no further than the OOTS Kickstarter to be disabused of that notion. If anything, OOTS is successful, and Rich Burlew’s lifeblood, despite his past efforts to make Giant in the Playground into something more; OOTS started as a way to attract visitors to the site to read the articles on gaming and game design, and the fact that it still manages to dominate the site is a testament both to how excellent it is and also to Rich’s failure to turn OOTS into the PA of D&D-style gaming – a track that looked very plausible back when it was still a bunch of gags about a party of adventurers trawling a dungeon, and already something that just about every D&D-player out there had heard of. Artistically, the comic and the world would have been far poorer for such a move, but in terms of success Rich Burlew could have attained far higher heights.

All webcomic artists, unless they put their comic behind a paywall or aren’t making any money at all, are in some business other than webcomics. If you’re following the ever-popular T-shirt selling route, your webcomic is really just a testing ground for new T-shirt ideas (and elaborate advertisement for the shirts themselves), which tends to lend itself more to being a meme factory than anything else. That’s a bad sign for anyone looking to stand by artistic integrity and a more story-based comic. Luckily, Burlew, the Foglios, and Tom Slidell have been able to make money off of story-based comics by selling print collections of the comics, with some occasional T-shirts and other tchotskes thrown in. Balder seems to be considering a very different route. He’s discovered what binds his readership together, and making sure his site caters to all of it, not just the webcomic that drew them there. In so doing, he has a chance to allow his site to cater to anyone to which that would appeal – and introduce them to the comic in the process.

The OOTS Effect, Part I

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I was astounded by how quickly Kickstarter saw three million dollar projects within a month after not having any the first few years of its existence. As a result, Kickstarter has sort of become my latest obsession, as I wanted to see what effect the OOTS (and Double Fine) drives had on the success of future drives on Kickstarter, especially comics (and video game) drives.

I’ve seen some limited effect already:

  • Erfworld, which started out hosted on the same site as OOTS, saw its drive to make a motion comic out of the first book succeed within two days, and is now pushing to remake its entire site, with potentially more big changes coming depending on how successful it turns out to be.
  • R. Stevens’ drive to make an e-book out of his Diesel Sweeties comics has actually been getting more publicity within the webcomics community than the OOTS drive, with Gary “Fleen” Tyrell being the only webcomic news blogger to write about the latter more than once to my knowledge. The Diesel Sweeties drive has made over ten times its goal.
  • However, the first true beneficiary of what, in their case, may be more accurately termed the Double Fine effect may be the Idle Thumbs podcast. They made their $30,000 goal in two hours and shot to over $70,000 seemingly out of nowhere by late Monday night, about a day after launch, now standing at about $87,500 with a month still to go. Becoming the next million-dollar Kickstarter may be out of reach (if only because I have no idea what a podcast could possibly do with that much money), but people probably said that about the OOTS drive; certainly cracking the top ten drives in Kickstarter history is very much within reach. It’s worth noting that like OOTS and Double Fine, Idle Thumbs has a pre-existing audience; I’d say that makes it all the more incredible that the first million-dollar project was able to crack that mark without one.
  • On the other hand, keep an eye on the Ramos alarm clock as well. That drive made its $75,000 goal in about a week (including a steep rise at one point from around $40k to over $60k in less than 48 hours) with five and a half weeks still to go, and now stands at $83,514. I really don’t think a million dollars is likely there, but the top ten overall certainly is, and the rave reviews posted on the project page remind me a lot of what was said about the Elevation Dock.
  • I’m also interested in whether we’ll see new frontiers for individual categories. In the Comics category, for example, OOTS broke the record held by the Womanthology at $109,301, but that was a fairly exceptional project in its own right, with a pretty big gap of its own between that and third place at just over $46,000, less than OOTS’ original goal. (Now you know why Rich was skeptical of the prospects of his drive.) Well, Benign Kingdom is changing that, raising $51,000 entering its last 48 hours and making the $50,000 range seem like more of an attainable goal for a comics project.
  • Meanwhile in Games, Code Hero is making such a late push as its drive comes down to the wire that it has an outside shot at holding the category record for the time before Double Fine finishes, becoming only the fourth Games project over $100,000. Third place among completed drives is held by the Schlock Mercenary Board Game at $82,056, a mark Idle Thumbs has already passed, putting them sixth in the category overall. Third place could be as much as double that depending on how high Code Hero climbs, and that’s before Idle Thumbs moves past that territory. I caution that I have reason to believe that some projects are not being listed with their category and so aren’t showing up on their category’s “Most Funded” list.

Summing up the OOTS Kickstarter

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When the book is written and the legacy and history of OOTS is summarized, it will be noted that in early 2012, the comic’s fans took a donation drive with a goal of barely over fifty thousand dollars and raised one and a quarter million dollars by the time it was over. With the improvements to the site and comic likely to come, the demonstrated devotion of the fans, and the increased popularity of the comic both as a result of the Kickstarter itself and with the books restocked on store shelves, I’d argue it’s as big a milestone in the history of the comic as anything that’s occured in the comic itself.

To gain some perspective on just how much OOTS’ fans have done over the past month:

  • The initial goal was broken in barely over twenty-four hours.
  • Within 48 hours, the drive was the highest-earning in the history of the Comics category, a record it has now broken ten times over.
  • By the time the drive was three days old, it had already succeeded beyond Rich’s wildest expectations (he only ever expected two books to be reprinted from the drive).
  • Within nine days, the drive had paid for reprinting every book that needed to be reprinted going in, cracked the top ten drives in Kickstarter history the next day, and reprinted every single book in the series the day after that, with two-thirds of the drive still to go.
  • Thirteen days into the drive, Rich was able to realize a longtime dream to print an OOTS coloring book, a dream he couldn’t make work until the sudden influx of cash caused by the drive.
  • What started as a fairly standard chart for the progress of the drive turned into a 26-part mini-epic, complete with dragon fight, that in many ways was a microcosm of the progress of OOTS itself (which may foreshadow something about how the comic will end).
  • At no point in the drive did its progress really slow down in any substantive way, with the only possible exceptions coming over weekends.
  • With a week left in the drive, Rich had basically paid for everything he could have dreamed of paying for (with most of the money raised in the preceding week going towards paying for additional costs incurred as a result of the drive’s success), and the drive essentially ran on fumes (and Rich’s continuing to put up new goals and rewards regardless) the rest of the way, with much of the remaining money going into a general operating fund, including sprucing up the site and getting new drawing tools. The wild success of the drive will end up giving all OOTS’ fans “more OOTS, better OOTS, and…faster OOTS” for years to come.
  • During the last week, Rich also attempted to put up a new OOTS comic every day for eight days, but wound up late by a missed day. Rich has also committed to another stretch of nine comics in a row later in the year.
  • OOTS is the third drive in Kickstarter history to raise over a million dollars. The drive finishes as the project in Kickstarter history until the Double Fine drive (which just crossed two million) knocks it down a notch in a month or so. The drive raised nearly ten times the initial goal just in the final push.
  • When all was said and done, nearly 15,000 fans raised $1,254,120, for an average of nearly $84 per donor – an average of two books per order. Some fans have taken this high average as a sign of how “devoted” OOTS fans are, to which I ask: are they really more devoted than other fans, or just richer?
  • As the drive became more and more successful, it attracted attention from all over the Internet, not only from the webcomics community, not only from the comics blogosphere, not even only from the halo surrounding Kickstarter, but from sites as high-profile as Boing Boing.
  • For just ten dollars, over 14,000 OOTS fans will receive a book’s worth of new stories in PDF form: a new tale of O-Chul’s past, a new tale of Elan’s past, three prequel or interquel stories on characters decided by fans, two stories following up on tales in a limited-edition book published last year including a parody of Romeo and Juliet, and a parody of a D&D setting, plus four sheets of cut-out monster miniatures drawn in the OOTS style for use in D&D games and a magnet with Roy on it. Only the magnet and O-Chul story were planned at the beginning of the drive.
  • In addition to the above, Yours Truly will be getting the aforementioned limited-edition book (one of over 25,000 books to be sent out as a result of the drive), the aforementioned coloring book, a sheet of stickers with OOTS characters on them, and a notepad primarily for use in D&D games. Others will be receiving an art print with the entire cast on it, a “mini-expansion” for the OOTS Adventure Game (with quite a few getting the game itself), crayon drawings of them and their characters, and commemorative patches.
  • Many rewards won’t be sent to people until possibly as late as June, and a few that became available late in the drive will only be done after the others, so they could arrive at any point in the remainder of the year, meaning this drive will effectively define all of 2012 for OOTS.

It’s all quite astounding, really, and somewhat humbling for me. Although OOTS is one of the most popular webcomics on the Internet, it doesn’t normally get the sort of press as a Penny Arcade, xkcd, or Girl Genius, nor is it the same sort of critical darling within the community as a Questionable Content, Schlock Mercenary, or Gunnerkrigg Court (or the last two of the “gets more press” group, for that matter). It can feel like OOTS is still kind of a niche comic that only me and Robert A. “Tangents” Howard (and a little bit of Eric Burns(-White), back in Websnark’s heyday) are really paying that much attention to. So for a comic that I happen to have as my personal favorite and all of its fans to do something this huge… I mean, it’s kind of hard to put into words.

I keep writing Jake’s name as “John” for some reason. Also, this is the second time I’ve censored one of Hussie’s comics.

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(From MS Paint Adventures: Homestuck. Click for full-sized mixed-up feelings.)

I’m starting to get worried about Roxy.

We already had the revelation that she was the one behind Jane’s exploding computer. Then the “thirteenth troll”, already having problems seeing her, revealed to Dirk that Roxy would cause a “blackout” similar to the one caused by Rose’s turn to the Dark Side… only this one would black out the entire session. (Incidentially, this could have been predicted, but the troll is starting to look less like the omniscient oracle she started out as, having problems with her server player and getting reassurance about her own session from Dirk.) Then she demanded that Jane reveal her feelings to Jake before Dirk does, almost to the point of forcing her, even blackmailing her, against her own misgivings (and apparently unaware of their ectobiological relationship).

Add all this up, and you get the sense that, despite getting a piece of her viewpoint as a future player, there’s still a chance Roxy has her own agenda we’re not yet privy to, that I was right to wonder whether Jane will regret agreeing to believe everything she says for 24 hours, that the “blackout” may prove to be much more intentional than the “thirteenth troll” thinks. This is before we even get to her “wriggling day” reference in the last act, which certainly should be considered to add fuel to the fire.

Now, it’s possible the last of these acts can be construed as her being a more active shipper than, say, Nepeta; she just has such an interest in seeing Jake and Jane get together that she then proceeds to pester Jake into contacting Jane. Even knowing the case against her, I found myself having an interest in the same thing after the way the conversation between the two went. Her standing threat to Jane, though, keeps me from really taking Roxy’s side in any way, and I can’t help but wonder how much of Jane’s reaction is really “I missed my shot” as much as “OMG, Roxy is going to kill me” (and we don’t know how literal that may prove to be).

(Dirk’s auto-responder is also showing signs of going all HAL on everyone – Jake even calls it that – but that’s more obvious and there’s not much to be said about it, other than my being perplexed at how it can apparently control Dirk’s computer.)

The conversation between Roxy and Jane was immediately followed by a lengthy flash I’ve been remiss in not addressing, though there are only really two things – and one very tantalizing hint – in it, Jake getting pwned by Dirk’s robot and Dirk himself carrying the head of the Hegemonic Brute through the streets of Derse (seemingly evoking WV’s rebellion in the process), sticking it on a pole, and attaching a message to it. The Draconian Dignitary is dispatched to investigate the latter by his new boss… who sure as hell looks like the Condesce, former ruler of Alternia last seen getting enlisted as a servant of Lord English. Whether it is really the same character making her way to this new session somehow, or whether (as has been seemingly heavily hinted for the Condesce and speculated for the new boss) she’s also Betty Crocker, is (as with several other apparent refugees of the pre-Scratch universe) yet to be confirmed.

Oh, and Jake blacked out (did SOPA make that join Homestuck‘s repository of arc words?) and had an encounter with a troll who is probably not Vriska. One wonders if this is a hint at the identity of the “thirteenth troll”‘s universe, as well as that “wriggling day” reference…