Can Town (The Official Homestuck Thread)

Favorite Troll?

  • Aradia Megido

    Votes: 10 16.1%
  • Tavros Nitram

    Votes: 6 9.7%
  • Sollux Captor

    Votes: 12 19.4%
  • Karkat Vantas

    Votes: 24 38.7%
  • Nepeta Leijon

    Votes: 15 24.2%
  • Kanaya Maryam

    Votes: 8 12.9%
  • Terezi Pyrope

    Votes: 21 33.9%
  • Vriska Serket

    Votes: 10 16.1%
  • Equius Zahhak

    Votes: 4 6.5%
  • Gamzee Makara

    Votes: 7 11.3%
  • Eridan Ampora

    Votes: 6 9.7%
  • Feferi Peixes

    Votes: 9 14.5%

  • Total voters
    62
can someone explain what is going on because i think i've completely lost track of everything that's happened in this story

whatever happened it sure feels anticlimactic
 
no but seriously can someone please clarify what happened???

my friend tells me that the new update just made the past two or three years of homestuck essentially irrelevant
 
Yeah it basically did. Due to John's retcons, a lot of stuff happened, among the most significant is, he stopped Terezi from killing Vriska. Vriska being alive apparently had all this influence, as Rose isn't drunk and Terezi kept her blindness. She was also able to stop Grimbark Jade from teleporting them all over the place and that one glitched flash from happening
 
that's... really frustrating? i really don't see why this kind of roundabout storytelling was necessary, even for homestuck
 
Because Vriska is Andrew's Controversy Machine and he's always looking for new ways for her to divide the fandom.
 
Nabber said:
that's... really frustrating? i really don't see why this kind of roundabout storytelling was necessary, even for homestuck

Do you mean from [s ] Game Over, or all the back since [s ] Cascade, where John basically undid everything that has happened since [s ] Casade. If the first, it was just to explain why John was in a doomed timeline and how John and Roxy from the one timeline were killed to make room for the Alpha John and Roxy from their one session.

But if the second, I think the whole point of this was just showing how John finally got onto the right path to get into the right timeline that will win in the end. You see, Vriska needed to be dead in his "doomed" timeline because without dead Vriska combining her strengths with Aranea, John would have never found out that ultimate power to stop Lord English that enables him to teleport. It also wouldn't have enabled him to know about a resurrection ring that he would get from Tavros to keep for later use. However, because he wasn't aware of Aranea's plot to come back alive, and him glitching across the entire universe, it's what caused [s ] Game Over with everyone dying and him seeing the wreck that occured. We also wouldn't have known that Jade or Jane would be taken over by the Fish Queen (forgot her name right now), and how it was basically going downhill from there because they were being taken over by them, and Aranea coming into the session actually broke free part of her reign - enough for Roxy and Terezi to get out and find John.

John's original timeline was very important from the scratch and stuff because he needed Vriska dead, and to get all that information that he got from his timeline. The glitches put in his story from Caliborn was basically Hussie saying "you don't need to know this information that would take 3 months to explain because it's going to be skipped later", which is why it was confusing for a bit with all those glitchy flashes and how everyone got separated. Once John played the organ and got rid of the glitches, it allowed him to be able to teleport things like his planet to wherever he needed to go.

I think Terezi also realized what needed to happen, and knew that Vriska was the key to stopping Jane and Jade's commands, which was Vriska's manipulation powers. The scarf was in order to ensure that John would go back and stop Vriska, but simply punching Vriska and telling Terezi that he was doing the right thing was not enough, because she needed to ensure her past self not to kill Vriska even after John came back. She had him "troll" her and discover that Gamzee was behind all of this so that Vriska and Terezi could co-exist without Terezi feeling the need to kill her, and actually use her to stop what would happen in the future.

But yeah, had Hussie after the scratch just put John in the right timeline from the get-go, he wouldn't have had Vriska's ghost get him that teleportation stuff which he can use to stop Lord English, and knowing how to defeat Caliborn, and we would have been left with the same doomed timeline that occured with [s ] Game Over. But now, with all that knowledge, they are able to have a chance to stop Lord English, and to stop the Fish Queen, and to stop Aranea, since 1 - she won't have Gamzee as a puppet to use to have him get her that ring and 2 - Roxy has the ring now to prevent her resurrection.

I don't know why, but I just feel like this last update just answered everything that has happened since Scratch and why it was so important that we witnessed [s ] Game Over. It kind of was like where you have a puzzle and everything is not making sense because you're missing a few pieces. You're wondering "what the heck is it supposed to look like", and now it all makes sense. You got the Vriska piece, and suddenly everything lines up correctly.

God, the realization of how everything fit together in Homestuck with that last update literally me gasp louder than when I finally figured out how trig worked.
 
SiFi said:
Because Vriska is Andrew's Controversy Machine and he's always looking for new ways for her to divide the fandom.
qft


And yeah, the knee-jerk reaction is "so a third of Homestuck (going by the word count of the Act 6 intermissions minus the Caliborn inter-inter-missions) was a doomed timeline all along? laaaame." And in some ways, I do feel a bit cheated to not get to see how the characters work out the issues that built up over the intermissions. Of course, in other ways, I guess I'm glad certain character derailments didn't happen, and it does fit together all nice.

Plus, there's the hope that a bunch of stuff from Cascade to Game Over still happened, just with minor differences. Like, Cascade's still the same, pretty much - just replace Gamzee with Vriska in that one shot of the trolls watching the Green Sun appear and you're basically set. And Meenahquest could still happen mostly the same way until Ministrife, but even then, who knows, maybe Meenah still got in a fight with alive/sleeping!Vriska over something instead of dead!Vriska. Aranea was the main muscle behind the mind control, so she and Meenah could still have led their army around Paradox Space - hell, maybe Tavros lead the treasure hunt in the absence of dead!Vriska (and/or maybe the LE damage to horrorterror land even transcends doomed timelines somehow, idk). Gamzee could also still slink off to do his capricious clown stuff, just without involving Terezi blackrom-wise on the side: seeing as he's not gonna get sawed in half, that'll make meeting up with Lil' Caliborn/Calliope and all that jazz much more possible this timeline around.

And really, when you think about it, all John did was basically what Davesprite did: he jumped from a doomed timeline to influence the alpha timeline in a way so that it doesn't get doomed. The only difference is that John's not doomed for being from a doomed timeline because of the weapon (and Roxy and Jaspers get the protection too). Plus his changes affect past panels because of the nu-media angle of Homestuck - although when reading it archivally from now on, the arms and oil and whatnot would have always been there, giving it the feeling of changes-to-the-past-were-always-part-of-the-past style, paradox-free time travel (which makes the whole thing pretty interesting). And I'm guessing another aspects of John's particular breed of time travel means ghosts won't be spawned by his reconned doomed timeline, again, hence no dead Gamzee outside the glitched session (which would have masked his death from in-story Hussie, so him saying Gamzee never died as far as he knew still works).

Anyway, taking all that into account, if you could accept Davesprite "changing" the past, then John "changing" it should be fine too, aside from all the character development to nowhere along the way. But at least doomed!Terezi still got some closure right at the end, Jade and Davesprite's issues were offscreen anyway, and maybe Rose still got drunk all the time along the way (I thought it had more to do with her mommy issues - she and Gamzee actually seemed to get along) and simply sobered up for the raid. We won't know until we see more.
 
Walkazo said:
Anyway, taking all that into account, if you could accept Davesprite "changing" the past, then John "changing" it should be fine too, aside from all the character development to nowhere along the way.

There is one factor you are not taking into account, which is understandable because you only started reading the comic recently. For people who have reading the comic in real time however, this is pretty much a slap in the face. This retcon bullshit pretty much rendered everything after Vriska's death meaningless. The time that passed IRL between Vriska's death and now roughly amounts to three and a half years.

That's three and a half years we wasted getting invested in plotlines that amounted to nothing. Three and a half years that could have been used for other things. I guess it's my own fault for getting invested in a webcomic and trusting some guy I don't even know not to waste my time.

The Davesprite arc might be superficially similar, but it was actually pretty upfront about being a doomed future and didn't do anything on the absolutely colossal scale of this fuckery. In the face of how much time was wasted with this nonsense, I don't think you can accurately compare these two elements.

I'm going to be honest: If the comic wasn't super close to ending, I would drop it entirely right now. Part of me even wants to do it regardless of how close the ending is.
 
So basically the whole thing was....just a shitty twist? I mean, I'm not sure what I expected going into this update...but it wasn't this, so I guess Hussie did his job?

I don't know, something about it doesn't sit right with me, but if it really did make the whole past three or so years null and didn't even bring back the best character then I guess my only response is: "lol?"

I_expected_nothing_and_was_still_disappointed.gif
 
i started reading about the time when vriska died and this doesn't seem that ridiculous to me

i highly doubt all the events that transpired will simply not exist, nor do i believe that this new whatever-it-is is going to be all it's cracked up to be

just wait to see how it plays out. this isn't the first time hussie has "ruined everything"
 
Like I said before, John and Roxy seemed too happy as they disappeared. Happiness is never a good sign.
 
Nabber said:
no but seriously can someone please clarify what happened???

my friend tells me that the new update just made the past two or three years of homestuck essentially irrelevant
Nabber said:
that's... really frustrating? i really don't see why this kind of roundabout storytelling was necessary, even for homestuck
Benefits for starting very late with Homestuck: literally just that.
 
Nabber said:
i mean maybe if it was a few months but act 6 is literally half of homestuck
But a lot of Act 6 are the B2 kids (and Caliborn gets a modest chunk too): if you do the math, the reconned stuff only amounts to a third of Homestuck. Still a pretty big damn amount, but as I've said before, the hope is that not everything of that third never happened.

Clunk said:
Nabber said:
no but seriously can someone please clarify what happened???

my friend tells me that the new update just made the past two or three years of homestuck essentially irrelevant
Nabber said:
that's... really frustrating? i really don't see why this kind of roundabout storytelling was necessary, even for homestuck
Benefits for starting very late with Homestuck: literally just that.
Plus there's the age-old problem of the author underestimating exactly how long it will take to hammer the stuff out. Pretty sure Hussie didn't mean for it to stretch out as long as it did, but writing takes time, and art takes longer, especially when RL is also demanding your attention...

And tbh, you should write stuff with the archival experience as your focus, seeing as your work's gonna be sitting around completed much longer than it's going to be updating live. Flourishes like the arms and oil everywhere afforded by the live nature of the Internet are by design for the current readers, and there's lots of feedback from the fandom into the story, so it's very much dependent on the serial aspect, but most of the audience will come to it after it's done, so that's how it has to stand up best. Not that spending weeks on ultimately undone stuff is particularly fun, and I take a dim view in general of undermining the emotional impact of things like Game Over and whatnot. But w/e, hopefully the payoff will make it worth-while in the end.



News upd8, btw (posting in case Hussie removes parts of it later, as he does periodically).

So what do we call this pause? I've been batting ideas around all day. We could go with the obvious choice, the MINIGIGAPAUSE. Or maybe, MEGAPAUSE 2: BACK IN THE MEGASADDLE. Or if that makes too much sense, we could always settle on the MICROTERAPAUSE. As you can see, there are so many incredibly intelligent and meaningful things we could call this pause. Deciding how to refer to the pause is an exercise that I will leave to the reader. Feel free to discuss the matter with friends. Or strangers. Anyone who will listen really. If they start to run away, I strongly recommend you chase them.

Why don't we say that A665 begins on 4/13. That's a fun number that we all can get excited about. I have a lot of catch-up work to do between now and then. Not the least of which is drawing the actual content to be posted. But also a lot of gamedev work. Game production is rolling pretty hot right now. Stuff is being churned out almost faster than I can keep track of. Did I mention? I accidentally started running a game studio a little while ago. Whoops, sorry about that. There are all these people being paid to make things happen, and I have to be like "Yeah, keep doing that stuff, everybody." It's getting pretty easy to lose track of how many people work for What Pumpkin. My last estimate was somewhere between 30 and 1000. The true figure is a very frisky moving target.

A6A6A5, a.k.a. Caliborn's Masterpiece, is actually done. It's probably better to hold off posting it until 4/13, when more content will soon follow aftewards. I am sure pausing on that note for months would mess with your head a lot more than the note we're already pausing on. I sometimes feel I have at least a modest responsibility to manage your sanity. It'll be tough sitting on this content though. Tougher than sitting on all of A664 for the better part of a year. I don't think it is out of line to describe it as the best material this website will ever exhibit. It will be all down hill from there, in every direction. Even up.

Speaking of sanity management, way back when, I was pretty on the fence about posting A664 spaced out over months like I did, vs. all at once. Doing the latter in hindsight probably would have been a fucked up thing to do to the internet though. The GAME OVER fallout alone was a bit much as it was. Including it in tandem with the rest of it? Not sure what to make of that. Let's review the CONTENT CRUSH that would have entailed. Bad Anime -> Game Over -> Sadstuck -> Lowas Quest -> 100 retconned panels of oil -> A bunch of other shit -> Punky Serket -> Fantroll Storytime -> 8 password pages -> The Kiss On Horse Mountain -> and finally -> The Punchline. You know, that's an awful lot of baloney to publish. I think the fell-swoop reaction to all that would have been quite a thing to behold, but also, perhaps an irresponsible thing to do to a hapless fanbase after a year in hibernation. I'm told that in 2015, young people are heavily susceptible to "the feels", and trifling with those forces could be injurious to their future development. Wait, did that just sound like something your grandpa would say? Mother fuck, where did I put my cane. Oh right, I snapped it in half from shaking it at the sky.

I may have been in the process of making a point there, but we're going to have to pick this up another time. The comic isn't going to pause itself!!!
 
I personally don't think that when John retcons something it just never happened at all. To be honest, I think it works more like this:
Every instance of a universe is contained inside big frogs
So first, you have: Alt!universe, then big frogs, then timelines from which there exist the alpha timeline and doomed timelines, then you have the retcon juju that creates an alpha ALPHA timeline, which is the one we are seeing by the end of A6A6I4. Dave, the meta guy, even hinted at this during A6A6I1, saying that John isn't messing with the alpha timeline, but with the alpha ALPHA timeline. So I think it's just a timeline within a timeline inception-ish kind of thing.

This means the treasure hunting expedition DID happen, all of the things we saw happened. They didn't just stop being a thing that happened or unhappened suddenly because of retcon magic, they just aren't part of the newly generated timeline. So AS a person who has been reading this comic for years, I personally don't think it was a waste of time at all.
 
That doesn't really mean much for anything. Whether the old iterations of the characters were deleted from existence or just relocated to another time layer, their development has still turned into a dead end. They, after having been the characters we followed for years, will now be replaced by characters that look the same, but have had different experiences. The Jade that watched Con Air with John and had a relationship with Davesprite is gone. The Tavros that felt genuine confidence and finally grew a backbone and moved on from Vriska is gone. The Vriska who learned to be humble and overcome her egocentrism is gone.

You could argue that maybe these things still happen somehow, but to be honest I'd find that kind of ridiculous. Vriska is a very impactful person, her presence on the meteor must have significantly altered what happened on it. That's three years worth of changed history right there. Similarly, Jade spent her three years grieving over the loss of her brother and friends. Grief and isolation can change a person drastically, so her history should be significantly altered too. Thinking that you can alter three years of someones life and somehow end up with the same person afterwards... it just wrecks my suspension of disbelief.

Maybe Hussie will throw in another curveball. Something ridiculous like "In this iteration of the alpha timeline, it turns out John's changes somehow made Calliope predominate and turn into the grand messiah that everyone was looking for. She played SBURB and, upon being faced with Yaldabaoth's choice, chose the opposite of what her brother chose. Another magical retconny house was left behind and found by... idk... let's say Dave, why not. And now, with his new retcon powers Dave decides to retcon John's retcons, and John and Roxy end up exactly where they left, with nothing changed. The message is: 'You cannot change history ever, dwi'."

But if this is played straight, John and Roxy will end up in a universe populated by people who look like their friends, but are actually different people. If you've ever lost contact with a friend for several years and suddenly they come back completely changed, you pretty much know what that feels like.

But anyway, I feel like I've shat up this thread for long enough with how much I hate this retcon shit and I don't want to stink up the comic for people who don't have a problem with it, so Marowak, if there is any more need for discussion, we can talk about it in private.
 
You guys, what if John retconned Cali's development so that 'born still won, but not until he was supposed to? Wouldn't that have KAH-RAYZEE konsequences?
 
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