so why is it, anyway, that Skaia punishes so harshly folks who “dare” to play it alone? why have all this data, essentially a completely different game, that won’t affect the vast majority of its players? at least the particularities of a void session come straight from the application of the standard rules – no prototyping pre-entry means that the Battlefield is still in stalemate, underlings don’t have any content to give them “meat”, etc. but a dead session is its own beast, like you had to go out of your way to ask if n_players == 1 then… a bunch of random tedious bullshit that practically nobody can handle, explicitly “punishment”
it’s almost as if Skaia has a reason to really avoid a single-player session, beyond it just being “against the rules”.
I was looking up stuff about blood proteins for Reasons and like, I know we as a fandom have covered this before. The ones we at least have a cursory familiarity with are hemoglobin, hemorythrin, and hemocyanin.
For those who aren’t familiar I’ll give a quick overview.
Hemoglobin is a blood protein commonly found in humans and other vertebrates. As an iron protein, it turns red when oxygenated, and (unlike popular misconception) is dark red when deoxygenated. This is the most efficient blood protein to current knowledge.
Hemocyanin, a copper protein, is commonly found in arachnids, crustaceans, and cephalopods. It’s colorless normally and takes on a blue color when exposed to oxygen.
Hemorythrin is based on iron as well, but is structured differently than hemoglobin. Normally clear, it’s a bright pinkish violet when oxygenated, and found in marine worms and brachiopods.
Now, you’ve probably heard of those before. What you probably aren’t familiar with is a fourth oxygen-carrying protein.
Chlorocruorin, which is light green when deoxygenated and a darker green when exposed to oxygen, is structurally similar to hemoglobin, to the point where it can occasionally appear red like its cousin in certain concentrations. The only difference is a key change in the chemical structure. It’s commonly found in worms and leeches and, unlike its name implies, doesn’t contain any chlorine.
How this comes into play in regards to Homestuck is that it wouldn’t be difficult to imagine that the hemospectrum trolls are privy to is simply made up of different combinations of these four proteins, with different saturations and ratios of each to make up the different hues. This would mean that four castes have the “purest” blood, with their blood only carrying one of these proteins and giving them their characteristic hue.
The four castes? Blue, violet, crimson, and lime. One is mutant and the other, on Alternia at least, is extinct. Having the four different proteins be, for the most part, consistent throughout the hemospectrum in their different combinations, would allow for mutations to crop up of certain uncommon combinations that are rarer. With hemoglobin and chlorocruorin being so structurally similar and, at times, even sharing a hue, it also offers merit to the “crimson is mutant lime” theory.
Here’s a chart from this website, to illustrate the different proteins and their structures and hues. You can click through the link above to see it a bit more clearly.
“Now wait a minute, Teo,” you might be thinking. “Haven’t we seen those colors elsewhere in Homestuck before?” And the answer is, YES! In fact, we’ve seen those colors since the very beginning! Where, you ask?
Right freakin’ here.
Either Andrew Hussie is an absolute genius, or he’s a master of coincidence, but it’s wonderfully infuriating either way.
TL;DR: Blood proteins could probably mix to make different colors in an alien species and the four proteins we know of match the Beta kids’ associated colors.
–The opening statement comes right out with the main thesis: “I still think [Eridan’s] character arc is a metaphor for the Obama presidency.” Such an odd assertion phrased in such a direct way is the first of the post’s many unexpected twist and turns. In a way, it’s an excellent thesis statement; it lets the readers know exactly what they can expect from the rest of the text. Notable is the inclusion of the word “still.” Had someone attempted to dissuade this individual from believing this theory? More than one someone?
–The first paragraph starts pretty slowly: the comparison of the guy who does everything in twos to bipartisanship and the claim that
a gay character represents the LGBT community
aren’t too out there when compared with the original assertion that Eridan Ampora symbolizes Barack Obama. Saying a character who wants to care for society’s downtrodden symbolizes social welfare programs is comparatively not much of a stretch either, nor is drawing a parallel between a major villain and the GOP. Then, out of nowhere, like the storm after the calm, like a clown honk followed by a gunshot, appears “Jade (Reagan) ”. Equal parts wham line and establishing character moment for our unknown theorist, the absurd comparison between lovable, open-minded 13-year old girl Jade Harley and Ronald Fucking Reagan, fortieth president of these United States, upends all our expectations, expectations which were pretty out-of-the-ordinary to begin with considering they were set by the comparison of Eridan Ampora to Barack Obama. That the anonymous theorist goes on to explain the reasoning behind this comparison in no way mitigates the shock. "Jade (Reagan)” changes everything. Anything can happen now. There are no rules anymore.
Okay Vriska is super difficult for me to read but here we go
-She genuinely doesn’t undertand morality alot of the time. Her entire worldview is shaped around her own survival so she struggles with concepts that fall outside of self preservation.
-Despite this she has a very intense need for validation! She needs to believe she is important in order to justify her life.
-she’s actually very emotionally fragile and has several breakdowns in canon when her sense of validation has been lost.
-She thinks she is good at reading people, but she is actually t e r r i b l e. She hasn’t the slightest idea how to identify emotion and honestly only gets as far as she does because telepathy.
-She is very dramatic and over the top in conversation to cover for the fact she has no idea what social rules are.
– She stims by rubbing her dice together in her palm. Also by shaking/smashing magic 8 balls.
-She has a special interest in game mechanics and how they can be exploited. She especially enjoys analysing rules to identify how they can be bent and manipulated to her maximum advantage.
-She is the worst for personal space. Like the sort of person who will jump a milr away if you touch her but also hear hug you from behind with no warning.
-She gets echolalia! Thats part of why she repeats certain words and phrases a lot (CAHOOOOOOOOTS!!!!!!!!)
homestuck is a story about 16 kids having their agency taken from them and their journey of forcibly taking it back
honestly i think this might be why i love homestuck so much, because at the core, this is the message. it’s about 16 kids who were set up to fail, literally told that there was no way to win and they were all going to die and guess what? the people telling them that were right! they all were going to die! it was inevitable. but they won and stayed alive anyways
NOT TO GET TOO META AND FAKE DEEP ABOUT THIS HALF ASSED ANALYSIS BUT THIS LITERALLY HAPPENS WITH THE NARRATIVE.. IT STARTS OUT CONTROLLED BY THE READERS BEFORE HUSSIE TAKES IT OVER
Y’all honestly yhink that Eridan Ampora, the guy who tries to be the best at anything he can get his hands on, who shoots sky whales dead in one shot with the weapon he received by reaching the highest fucking tier in FLARP, would have a whimpy ass team of fishy splashing useless Pokémon.
The seahorses/dragon types are pretty self explanatory, with the whole Sea Dragon being a type of sea horse which is his lusus and also sea horses are substitutes for dragons in some fiction. Gyarados is the knockoff dragon we never got to see thru. But its huge and mean and right up Eridans dark alley (ha get it).
Absol is the Pokémon that brings disaster that looks like a fucking angel when its Mega Absol. How could he not have Absol.
Cloyster is a badass and used in tournaments still so ofc he would pick the ice/water, big purple ball of anger with a horn on its head. And if you count Eridans fucking obsession with material goods, the whole “pearl in a clam” thing is just even more obvious.
Depending on who he’s fighting he’ll bust out the Mega Gyarados or the Mega Absol.
Also, notice how his lineup isn’t inherently all water types.
Because Eridan Ampora, proud seadweller, has absolutely no business in actually going into the ocean. Like, ever. He just stands around and tells ppl how bad they are for being on the surface and yet????? ?????? ? ? .?? ???
Horsea and Magikarp were his first Pokémon, because he lives on a beach/island. The others were caught during his adventuring or FLARPing.
I guess it kind of bothers me that every time I make a post
analyzing Vriska and (Vriska) someone comes out of the woodwork to tell me that
they thought (Vriska) was nice, but that her behavior wasn’t healthy/there is
such a thing as being too passive/(Vriska) was unhealthily dependent on Meenah.
Like yes, I know? That’s not subtext, that’s literal text, coming out of
Vriska’s mouth and Meenah’s mouth and clearly stated for the reader. “Being
like Vriska is bad, but being like (Vriska) isn’t good either.“ We’ve
established that (Vriska) wasn’t in a good place.
But like, people’s “character development” and personal
change aren’t linear and final, and what we saw with (Vriska) was someone who
was wildly oscillating between ideals of who she should be and was trying
something new out and got burned, badly. That doesn’t mean that the way she
looked when Meenah left her was like, the end point of her character. It wasn’t
the end of her road, and I mean that both in the literal sense of “she later
ran into Terezi on a road of gray and red squares and they hugged and it was
gr8” and the metaphorical sense of “she was still a person who was changing and
adapting and developing.” Just because we got to see (Vriska) in one of the
worst moments of her life having a total breakdown doesn’t actually mean that the
new feelings she was starting to have, of admitting vulnerability and allowing
herself to be interdependent and opening herself up to others, were some kind
of fault.
Tl;dr I think people extrapolate way too much about the way
that (Vriska)’s story outside of Remem8er ended and come to this almost
Vriska-like conclusion that (Vriska) was too fragile for this world and her arc
should serve as a cautionary tale about how being too nice can be bad. And imo,
I think a better way of thinking of it is that personal change involves a lot
of switchbacks and shifts and low points and vulnerability, which makes it very
easy for other people to fuck you up, but that doesn’t actually mean that there’s
something wrong with moving through those stages of vulnerability or exploring
new parts of yourself. (Vriska) was still growing, you guys. The last stages of
her relationship with Meenah wasn’t her DBZ-esque final form, and since it’s
been a literal year since we last saw her I feel like maybe we as a fandom can
stop beating a dead horse to remind each other that having your self-worth be
dependent on someone else after going through a crisis of faith and personality
is a Bad Thing.
I was gonna make another post saying “be nice to (Vriska)
2k16” but then I remembered that she literally killed thousands of ghosts and
about five people would probably remind me of that immediately after I posted, so how about
this: “be nice about (Vriska) and stop using her lowest point as indicative of
some kind of inherent character flaw.”
i thought lil cal was a juju and only one can exist at a time?
This is an excellent thing to address, because that’s what I used to think, too! But I think I’ve figured it out. Only one Lil Cal can exist at a time, true, but that means there is one Lil Cal PER TIMELINE.
And this plays right into my doomed timeline theory.
So before I go explaining everything, let’s revisit how doomed timelines are made. A lot of people, including me, think of the timelines in homestuck existing like so:
when in REALITY they look more like this
See, a doomed timeline is created when a character makes a choice. The timeline then splits. Version A of that character, who made the correct choice, continues living in the alpha timeline. While version B becomes part of the doomed timeline.
Doomed timelines eventually disappear into nothing, but they can linger for up to several months, as we know from this conversation between doomed Dave and doomed Rose:
Doomed timelines linger when the people in them will eventually aid the alpha timeline. This is when doomed Dave rewinds time to go back to the split in the timeline he made, and then he became Davesprite.
And we know Lil Cal exists in doomed timelines, because we’ve SEEN HIM in doomed timelines.
This is the point in which Dave makes the choice that fractures the timeline. Here we see Lil Cal, who will one day become sewn up by Kanaya and meet Gamzee. Dave dooms himself when he fails to stop John from making a suicidal move.
This leads to John dying. But Lil Cal still exists in this timeline, because Dave later prototypes his kernelsprite with it to create Calsprite.
And again, when John interrupts this scene between Terezi and Gamzee:
Lil Cal continues to exist in this new timeline that John has created. Nor has Lil Cal disappeared from the pre-retcon timeline, because we know Gamzee eventually brings that Lil Cal to Caliborn.
And I think this is all really important to realize, because it helps explain WHY Gamzee turns murderous in doomed timelines.
I think Karkat was right when he said this:
Not that this particular moment was a doomed timeline, but I do think that Gamzee going into “murder mode” is a clear sign that a timeline has become doomed. Why? Well, who is Lil Cal?
Lord English. Lord English is the Lord of Time, plus he’s semi-omniscient from being born from Doc Scratch. So Lord English, and additionally Lil Cal, is aware of not just everything that DOES happen, but also everything that COULD happen.
Which is why, when the timeline splinters off into a doomed branch, it becomes Lil Cal’s job to destroy everyone in said timeline. Why?
Well, so that the people in the doomed timeline can’t interfere or help the people in the alpha timeline. Because of this, Lord English gets to decide which timeline IS THE ALPHA TIMELINE. And we know how the alpha timeline ends, because we see Caliborn tell us about it here:
THE ENTIRE POINT OF THE ALPHA TIMELINE IS TO CREATE LORD ENGLISH.
THIS is why the kids could never win in any timeline. Because Lord English is leading them all to this point in time, in which he creates himself. THIS is why the only way John could save everyone was by creating his own timeline.
Because THIS
is a doomed timeline, too. Aranea doomed it when she took control over Gamzee. Because we know from this that Gamzee was not meant to go into murder mode again:
But then Aranea interfered, and doomed everyone, because Lil Cal was no longer controlling the timeline. So when Aranea’s hold over Gamzee broke, he went berserk almost immediately:
BECAUSE IT WAS A DOOMED TIMELINE, and would not serve in creating Lord English, so Lil Cal had to have it destroyed!
So Gamzee kind of serves a dual purpose to Lil Cal. He acts in ways that will eventually lead to Lord English’s creation, and in doomed timelines, he acts as a self destruct button, to stop it from interfering with the alpha timeline.
)(er Condescension just used Gemini psionics to blow Dirk and Roxy into the God-TIers, with the symbol belonging to Sollux and Mituna featuring prominently.
2 screens showing 2 different perspectives, 2 sets of 2 quest beds in 2 different crypts, 2 sets of 22 updates, 2 pawns of Lord English, 2 beams of energy, all the aftermath of combining 2 jujus – the references to our 2 Doom players, and thus Doom itself, are incredibly prevalent in these past few days.
And depending on Andrew’s intentions, this reference may be foreshadowing one of the only ways that the remaining living trolls can ascend.
You see, we still don’t know what Mituna’s sacrifice was:
ARANEA: The Heir of Doom was once a powerful psionic. He was gifted with vision twofold, and had strong prophetic insights wherever a 8leak future was concerned. He had much to say when it came to warning us a8out the path of doom and destruction we were all headed for, 8ut no one took him very seriously. 8ut one day he lost all those a8ilities when he 8adly overexerted himself. It’s hard to get any specifics from him, 8ut indications are that he applied every last 8it of energy he had toward some great act of heroism, saving us all from some looming threat. Not only did his exertion permanently 8urn out is psychic a8ilities, 8it it left him somewhat… er. Incoherent. MEENAH: yea i always wondered what happened there MEENAH: anyone ever get to the bottom a that ARANEA: No. The entire incident is shrouded in mystery. From his limited and scattered accounts of what happened, it seems very likely that Kurloz was with him at the time, and the only eye witness. And of course it’s impossi8le to get any relia8le information out of him. I guess we may never know, sadly.
And so far, the nature of Sollux and the Helmsman’s sacrifices were just to accelerate a ship or a meteor. So what could Mituna possibly have done? As an Heir of Doom, one who theoretically invites change in death and sacrifice, who could he have saved? Perhaps our current heroes, the ones fighting for the fate of reality, instead of the alpha trolls?
I hit upon an answer by accident – from misreading an ask about Terezi and Karkat visiting the alpha kids’ Prospit – about two months ago:
Mituna could have launched Prospit’s moon out of his own session at over the speed of light!
If it reaches the combined alpha kids’ session, and our embattled trolls – some of them quite possibly dying and in need of help – examined it… they would find many things! Sad detritus from the alpha trolls and dead prospitans. Wall scrawlings, perhaps red ones about triggers, or teal ones about s1ck gr1nds.
But in the center of the moon? As the identical dreamself affiliations for the alpha trolls in the Ministrife showed us, they’d find Quest Crypts, one each for Blood, Rage, Mind, Space, Breath, Light, and possibly Doom.
Terezi and Karkat, one previously wishing she had the chance to show the other around Prospit?Gamzee, the ambiguous is-he-or-isn’t-he-god-tier, an ally of Kurloz, the only one to witness Mituna’s sacrifice? Kanaya, the one who will need to repair the breach in Paradox Space: a task so monumental that it’s hard to imagine her doing so without godhood and flight? Even Tavros, set to revive alongside Vriska and fully realize his Page of Breath title to play a Peter-Pan-like role, helping Aradia guide the living and dead to freedom through the breach as if to Neverland (possibly being killed to allow his ascension as the end to a wild and unlikely villainous stint)? In the leadup to the final fight, ALL of them could ascend!
The only real restriction?
Whether Andrew wants them to ascend. It’s the only requirement… we can’t be sure if Quest Crypts that don’t belong to you still allow ascent, so whether they do or not is essentially at Andrew’s discretion. And though the kids’ total, eightfold ascension certainly increases the trolls’ chances, we can’t be completely sure that he wishes this to be the case.
But we could take an educated guess.
As the answer to the Ultimate Riddle would imply, only those willing to put their lives on the line for the sake of affecting how reality unfolds – or perhaps those with others who believe in them enough to will this on their behalf – circumstantially ascend to Godhood. And also implied in said theory, the trolls failed to mature and lost their game, entering a game state similar to some sort of ‘overtime’ where those whose wills would least – or least justly – affect reality amidst their peers were challenged and culled. Their session didn’t justify their ascension.
However, by fighting alongside the humans in the final reckoning of Paradox Space, they would earn renewed justification for ascension. And thus, the story’s themes – and Andrew Hussie – might finally, at the eve of the most desperate moment, allow them to level up.
So here’s my wholesome, inspiring, non-sadstuck explanation for why Terezi wasn’t in hanging out with the other survivors in the flashes we saw of the post-game world.
When Aradia saw the end of paradox space coming, she didn’t just sit there and watch it passively. With the help of Davepetasprite and a few others, she brought every single ghost out of the dream bubbles and into the new world, where they acquired solid flesh and a new chance to live their lives.
Only, that’s a lot of ghosts. There are only a few humans mixed in, mostly dream selves, but there’s a whole month’s worth of A2 trolls from the various timelines Aradiabot doomed, and six goddamn years worth of A1 trolls. And now they’re all alive, crammed intoa single physical plane of existence, and unlike dream bubbles, reality doesn’t react to your thoughts to help you find the people you’re looking for. Trollian and Pesterchum hardly work anymore–any doomed ghost can pester “CarcinoGeneticist” trying to find the Karkat from their timeline, but the only person who’s going to get the message is the Alpha Karkat. There’s thousands of traumatized teens out there trying to find their friends and family and lovers, and they have no way to contact each other.
And then you’ve got Terezi. She still feels out of place with the friendly, emotional humans. She still needs to be constantly working to avoid too much painful self-reflection. She still desperately seeks understanding of herself and others, understanding that can only be complete with understanding of all the timelines. She still has hundreds of timelines jangling around her head. She still wants to find Vriska.
So that’s how Terezi ends up having Davepetasprite make her a flashing ghostly booth and sitting herself down at the edge of the massive ex-ghost encampment, sorting timelines. Her booth looks a little like Aranea’s, but it’s her visitors who do all the talking. Those who want her help come to her to describe their timelines, where they went awry and what happened to everyone else in them, and Terezi listens and asks probing personal questions and tries to match them to the snatches of timelines she saw back in the game. And when they’re done, she marks them in her files and assigns them a random captcha-like code for their timeline and helps them sign up for a new Trollian or Pesterchum account with the code as their prefix.
Jade helps out too, because a lifetime of believing she has to put the greater good over her own needs doesn’t go away just because some ghost tells her to have fun. She and Dirk and Rose design a hyper-efficient PDA that can be easily alchemized with minimal grist cost, and they pass them out by the dozen to ghosts hungry for the chance to find the people they care about. But they all have people to go back to, and no matter how many times Dave says Terezi is welcome in the new Strider man-cave, Terezi isn’t so sure.
It’s tough, slow work, and she can’t know with 100% certainty if she’s matching and categorizing them correctly, and it’s painful hearing about some of the ways those timelines came to an end. But it’s also important work, and the look on a Nepeta’s face when she immediately trolls n9Tt9G0A-centaursTesticle on Terezi’s advice and finds her Equius makes it worth it. Terezi meets the version of Rose from the timeline she doomed, still wearing her purple pajamas, and helps put her in contact with her Jade and John and Davepeta, and doesn’t make fun of her silly outfit once. She meets the Tavros who put the army together, and he tells her that she’s doing a great job and he’s glad someone’s helping these ghosts find their friends, and he’ll spread the word.
There are thousands of ghosts and hundreds of timelines and it could be years before she finds her Vriska or the Terezi who made the retcons. But that’s not her only goal anymore. The more people she talks to and the more connections she helps make, the more she feels like she’s building a sense of what it means to be a kid and grow up. She may never feel whole, but she’s learning about the emptiness in everyone, how almost every Latula cemented her cool girl mask to her face a few years into her session and never took it off again, how some of the Feferis wants to reconnect with their friends but worry they’ll find themselves trying so hard to keep the peace that they end up back in the same old habits that made them feel so drained when they were still alive. She’s learning that even if Karkat and Kanaya seem much more redeemably human than she does, that almost every Alternian ex-ghost is struggling to adjust to a world where they’re alive but violence and death is no longer an appropriate answer to their problems.
When she finally finds the people who loom so large in her memories, Vriska won’t seem like a self-assured ball of confidence anymore, and that other Terezi won’t seem like an all-seeing goddess who handed Terezi the perfect timeline only for Terezi to screw it up. It will take time, but Terezi will learn to stop seeing herself as worse than other people. She’ll have a purpose, and she’ll have a way to learn what she wants to, and she won’t be sitting under trees or playing soccer with her fellow survivors, but that doesn’t mean she won’t eventually build her own happy ending.
queerhomestuck 