Sing me a bawdy song, make me merry

Magical Girl Project: Shitty Anime Lightning Round!

Sun, 19 May 2013 04:13:43 GMT

Gotta clear some room on my harddrive, so it's time to watch some shitty anime that's been collecting dust in my to-watch folder.

Pretty Rhythm Aurora Dream: a few assorted eps including the season finale.

I could describe PRAD as a Magic Idol Singer show except with ice skating and dancing instead of singing, but that would be quite deceitful of me because this is not a show about ice skating or magic or teenage girls — it's a show about clothing and the sale thereof. Yes, PRAD is one of those "30-minute commercial masquerading as a tv show" deals that were so popular in the U.S. during the 80's. Much is made of the girls' outfits, with one's skill at assembling fashionable ensembles being an important factor in one's success as an ice skating idol, and the main trio of girls even compete in a big contest where the prize is (drumroll please) a pair of shoes. The show also features some award-winningly terrifying uncanny-valley CGI whenever the girls have a dance/skate number, which is frequently. Possibly this was done as a nod to the arcade games upon which the anime was based? Dear Japan: Stop basing your anime on pachinko and/or arcade games. STOP IT THIS INSTANT.

All that said, this show pleasantly surprised me in that I didn't completely hate it. It's very by-the-numbers and was clearly made by a "creative" team who were half-assing it all the way through, but it wasn't as soulless and materialistic as it could have been. Actually I think the show's attempts at being un-shallow and heartfelt, though admirable, were a big detriment to it, especially in the finale. I don't know how to properly describe the facepalm-worthy crescendo of stupid that is the finale, but basically it's what happens when a writing team realizes "Shit, our show's climax is an ice-dancing competition. That's not epic enough! Gotta make it more epic, even if the result makes no sense whatsoever!" Just.... so stupid, y'all.

Happy Seven: all eps except the last one.

Jeez and I thought PRAD was by-the-numbers. Happy Seven is what happens when a bunch of peeps collaborate to make a moe magical girl anime with absolutely no new ideas in it. We will hit every cliché, gentlemen, every goddamn one! Starting with the characters: The heroine is a clumsy ditzy lovestruck pigtailed blonde, and her cohort includes a cool big sis with a hefty rack, a pair of loli twins who speak in unison and fall asleep at random moments, a dog-girl instead of the usual cat-girl who says "-wan" after all her sentences, a Rei Ayanami clone who goes all dere-dere for fishes, a braids-and-glasses techno-whiz chick, and a shy crybaby who turns into a tough bifauxnen when she transforms. The villains are a purple-haired purple-wearing haughty sorceress with a fan and the silver-ponytailed bishie student council president, and the token dude of the heroine's posse is a bland squinty prince-charming type whom absolutely every female in the cast wants to bone. The heroine, her two muggle pals, all seven members of the magical girl posse, and the purple villainess are all hankering for this guy's dull flavorless sausage, to the point where it becomes a major subplot that takes up a huge chunk of the runtime. I'd almost call this a harem anime, except that Mr. Blanderson is clearly not the protagonist.

The plot is what you've come to expect: Team of magical girls and token dude fight monsters that possess angsty people, resulting in a Victim-of-the-Week/Monster-of-the-Week formula, with the villains showing up occasionally to vaguely foreshadow some impending doom. The only unusual element here is that the heroine spends most of the show's run as a muggle; she starts off as a Victim-of-the-Week, and when the team senses a weird power lying dormant within her, they let her become their manager. Her powers only awaken during the finale. This could have made for an interesting twist, but unfortunately this show, like most bottom-of-the-barrel moe shows, spends most of its time faffing about with dull slice-of-life nonsense and finding every available excuse to turn the castmembers into chibis. There's even one episode that has zero monsters or magic in it and is just unapologetically filler. In a 13-episode series.

Akahori Gedou Hour Rabuge: Gedou Otome Tai: a few assorted eps.

So this is a moe Cute Witch show about five witchy sisters who live amongst the muggles by day and fail miserably at being evil by night, blah blah slice-of-life and lulzy hijinks, but I really only have one thing to say about this show: WHAT THE FUCK IS UP WITH THE FANSERVICE?!?

I expect a dude-aimed magical girl show to have fanservice, but not quite this much and certainly not this, um, sleazy? Like, we're edging into Moetan territory here. The main source of creepy is the 2nd and 4th sisters, Maika and Kanashi. Kanashi's in elementary school but looks like a busty high-schooler. Maika's in high school but looks like a flat-chested braids-and-glasses elementary-schooler. I'm sure you can see where this is going. Maika has a part-time job modeling children's clothing for what I can only assume is some fetish magazine or website considering the way they have her pose (and yes, she even dons the stereotypical school swimsuit). Meanwhile Kanashi's whole shtick is that she looks like jailbait but is totally clueless about it, so she's constantly shown in male-gaze-o-vision and her male teacher repeatedly explodes into nosebleeds and then berates himself for having dirty thoughts about his pre-puberty students, har har what a knee-slapper. I guess it's okay to treat the ten-year-old like a Playboy bunny so long as she doesn't look like she's ten. /SARCASM

Jewelpet, Season 1: eps 1-4, unsubbed.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Even if I'd had English subtitles to liven up the experience, I doubt I'd have been able to stay awake through this one. Mostly it strikes me as an extremely poor man's Onegai My Melody.

Magical Canan: assorted eps, Spanish subs (which I don't speak).

Another one where I don't need to hear the dialogue to know that it's shit. This is a suitable-for-broadcast adaptation of a porno OVA, which itself was adapted from a porno game, which I strongly suspect was meant as a porno spoof of Cardcaptor Sakura. Hence the series carries the stink of lazy ripoff. And what it doesn't rip from CCS, it swipes from Pretty Sammy. The visuals also look incredibly cheap, to the point where I started wondering if I was watching the porno version by mistake.

At one point, the heroine ends up at a cosplay café in Akiba where one of the waitresses is dressed up as Mew Mint from Tokyo Mew Mew. I guess the writers had never heard of "Don't mention a better anime in the middle of your crappy anime."

Welp, that's 1 GB freed up. Now to dig into the umpteen bazillion TMM/MerMelo/Sugar Sugar Rune/CCS episodes I've got squatting on here.

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MG Project: Mermaid Melody Vols 1-4

Sat, 04 May 2013 22:34:23 GMT

POP QUIZ: Name a bunch of narrative elements guaranteed to make pre-teen and teenage girls fork over all their money.

-mermaids
-princesses
-pop stardom
-Sailor Moon
-foofy dresses
-shirtless surfer dudes
-forbidden romance
-Gackt

In 2003, Michiko Yokote and Pink Hanamori had the bright idea to mash all these things into one guaranteed-to-sell manga. In fact, it's possible they were a little too confident in the failproof nature of their brainchild, because they don't seem to have put much effort into making it, y'know, not suck.

Mermaid Melody is bad. More than that, it's incompetent. I've read plenty of bad manga in my time, but even so, it's rare that I come across one that's fails on such a basic level of "how to tell a functional story with words and pictures." I hate to say it, but it's a lot like Hen in that sense. It's like...

Okay, so modern-day Hollywood puts out plenty of bad movies, like the Transformers films. But at least those films were made by people who grasp the basics of film-making and could probably have made something a lot better if they'd tried harder. On the flip side, you have the films featured on MST3K and Cinema Snob where the creators were so incompetent that they couldn't even keep the boom-mike out of the camera's view.

What I'm saying is: In Mermaid Melody, that boom-mike has a starring role.

Oh fuck these analogies, I'll just show you:

( Cut for large images )

But let's leave the details aside and widen our scope a bit: What about that failsafe premise I was praising before? MerMelo is about a bunch of mermaids who transform into idol singers and fight the forces of evil with their voices. It sounds like a pretty winning concept, but it's brought down by one big problem: MerMelo's heroines fight by singing. In a manga. Manga being a solely visual medium.

This ensures that nearly every single fight scene in MerMelo lasts a mere two pages. Each fight consists of three steps: 1) the heroines show up and say their In The Name Of The Moon speech, 2) the villain-of-the-week grimaces and yells some variant on "I'll get you next time, you meddling kids!" and departs, and 3) the heroines say their closing catchphrase: "How'd you like an encore?" That's literally it. Seriously, between steps 1 and 2, they may as well write the words "Insert song performance here" because we never get to see the girls sing for more than a page, nor do we see any of the lyrics. It's possible to depict singing in a soundless medium and still make it interesting — Full Moon Wo Sagashite did a pretty good job with that — and a few of MerMelo's battles at least make a vague attempt at being cinematic, but most of the time they don't even bother.

This also has the side effect of making villains look even more ridiculous and trivial than they usually are in this genre. The villain keeps sending his minions out on missions to kidnap the mermaids for use in his evil plot, but the minions always attack the mermaids head-on instead of using subterfuge, and the mermaids' songs always defeat the minion-of-the-week in one hit. These villains are so easily beaten and so disorganized that they can't possibly pose a threat.

Speaking of laughable villains, the main villain's consort is the resident Dark Magical Girl, a fallen mermaid princess named Sara. Her deal is that she was in love with a human who dumped her, and most of her dialogue is wangsty moaning about how no one can possibly understaaaaand how she feeeeels oh woe is me, I am literally the first person to get dumped in the history of everything. It's pretty insufferable, especially when we find out that he only dumped her for the sake of her kingdom.

Back to what I'd tentatively call the "combat": Fighting one's enemies via song is already a rather shaky concept, but MerMelo exacerbates this towards the end of the first story-arc by throwing in a bunch of shallow nonsensical bollocks about believing in yourself — for example, Lucia's given a magic harp with no strings, but she's able to play it because she belieeeeeves hard enough. Belief as a weapon can work, but here it's almost insulting how pastede on yey it is.

Another plot element that annoyed me: In the first volume, Lucia finds out, to her surprise, that she's a princess. She's spent all thirteen years of her life as a mermaid, and yet her caretakers and friends failed to tell her that she rules the top half of the Pacific because... she's still young? We never get a clear answer. Given the melodramatic tone of this manga, I assumed they included the "I'm a princess?!?" reveal in the name of creating cheap drama, but no, it's totally underplayed. It's like, "Oh by the way, you're a princess," "Oh that's a surprise, I guess." We don't even see the full reveal — it's shown in a flashback.

As for the non-plot parts of the manga, aside from the feeble comedy I already mentioned, it's mostly just a hurricane of fanservicey shojo clichés. I even started playing "spot the clichés" to entertain myself, but I'll need a separate post to list 'em all.

Anyway, final verdict on Mermaid Melody: an evil genius concept sunk by embarrassingly incompetent execution.

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MG Project: Creamy Mami Eps 1-3 and Full Moon Wo Sagashite

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 22:24:44 GMT

OKAY OKAY OKAY. There was that Magical Girl Project thing I was doing. And still am doing! I've just been lazy about posting.

Today it's time to take a voyage into the Magic Idol Singer subgenre, which is a distinct niche unto itself despite producing only about 8 shows over a 30-year period. Lately I've been reading Full Moon Wo Sagashite, which I've seen held up as the pinnacle of the subgenre. However, I've been holding off on talking about it, because Full Moon is one of the later entries in the genre, and I've heard that its approach is rather subversive. To understand the rebellious present, we must first examine the stodgy past, i.e.: Creamy Mami, the first Magic Idol Singer.

Creamy Mami was a 1983 original anime by Studio Pierrot; Full Moon was a 2002 manga by Arina Tanemura, adapted into a heavily cut-down and fillerized 2002 anime that I haven't seen. And right from the start, the journeys of their respective heroines are drastically different.

First off, Yuu winds up becoming Creamy Mami entirely by accident. She helps an alien, and he rewards her with the power to turn into a sixteen-year-old. In Episode 2, she's wandering around town in her older form, when she's spotted by a music exec and dragged into singing in a televised solo performance, filling in for an idol who's running late. By contrast, Mitsuki becomes Full Moon almost entirely by her own design. When she bumps into a couple of shinigami by chance, she interrogates them about their powers and asks them to make her older, specifically because she wants to attend a singing audition with an age limit. The shinigami grant her request, and she goes to the audition and blows everyone away. Then she gets an agent, releases a single, and quickly works her way towards fame in a (I assume) more conventional way than Yuu's serendipitous "discovered on the street" debut.

Second, and closely related to the above, Yuu has zero interest in singing prior to becoming an idol. In fact, when she first gets kicked out on stage, she uses her powers to summon a magic microphone which invents a signature song for her, teaches her the song, and gives her the talent to sing it, all in the blink of an eye. Mitsuki, on the other hand, has a lifelong passion for singing, to the point where she refuses lifesaving surgery for her throat cancer because she doesn't want to lose her voice. Her singing talent is all her own — all the shinigami do is remove the throat tumor when she's aged up, so that she can sing at full volume.

Third, both girls' powers are restricted by a one-year time-limit, but for completely different reasons. Yuu's time-limit is arbitrary; the alien just gave her a year's worth of powers. Mitsuki's time-limit exists because she's fated to die of throat cancer in one year, so her powers will only be relevant until then.

Fourth, while Mitsuki wants nothing more than to be a singer, the Creamy Mami writers made the bizarre choice of having Yuu dislike being a singer at first. After her debut performance, Yuu reflects that it was fun but she wouldn't want to do it again, and it's never made clear why. She spends most of Episode 3 avoiding the manager who discovered her and who is now searching for her Cinderella-style. In the end, he ignores her protests and basically badgers her into becoming one of his full-time singers. I'm guessing this was done as a cheap attempt at creating conflict and drama, but it doesn't make a lick of sense. The target audience of this show is little girls who are dying to become a glamorous idol singer; why make the heroine be a girl who rejects that life and has to be strong-armed into it? If you're going to make a shameless wish-fulfillment anime, you could at least have the protagonist appreciate her amazing good fortune.

As you've probably guessed by now, I infinitely prefer Mitsuki's origin story. I like that she has so much agency; she knows what she wants, and she pursues it. Even before getting powers, she's already plotting to sneak out of her grandma's house and go to that audition. When she happens to run into a pair of empowering entities, she seizes the opportunity and milks it for all it's worth. I also like that music and idol singing is woven into her character and her life pre-magic-empowerment, and even into her past (her dead father was an idol singer); it makes the magic idol singer gimmick feel more natural and in sync with the story, rather than just a random fantasy getting dumped on somebody with no interest in or connection to it. And most of all, I like that Mitsuki blatantly asks for her powers. Most Magic Idols and Magic Warriors either have to be wheedled and nagged into accepting powers, or they're just empowered automatically, without their consent or input. It's very rare and refreshing for a heroine to go "I want powers. Hey you, magical person, give me powers!"

The one area where Mitsuki's agency falters is in the individual transformations. Yuu (like most MGs) has a magic object with which she can trigger her transformation; she has total control. Mitsuki has no magic object; instead she must rely on her male love interest to trigger her transformation by snapping his fingers, and I'm sure there's a very interesting essay about gender politics somewhere in there. However, the only problem with this that Mitsuki encounters is when she needs to transform but her love interest is far away; to fix this, she has a magic whistle to summon him, and I don't recall Takuto ever ignoring the whistle or refusing to transform Mitsuki, although the author definitely could have explored that possibility if she wanted to.

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And now we wait.

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 18:43:01 GMT

Homestuck is on hiatus. Goddamn it, I thought I was done with hiatuses when I quit watching American TV! Oh well, at least this one is for a good reason. As someone on Tumblr said, now I'll have to break my habit of compulsively checking the MSPA site every few hours.

So I think the obvious thing for me to do now is....... go read Problem Sleuth. :D

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EEEEEEEEEEE

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 17:19:59 GMT

asdflhlgsalfkdhfksfjkdsfhfshfjd

THINGS I LOVE ABOUT THE RECENT UPDATE:

( ASDJFKDSJ )

4/13 is tomorrow. Place your bets! (Pffft I bet Hussie will have something totally anticlimactic happen just to fuck with us.)

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And I'm my own grandpa

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 04:25:54 GMT

OH SNAP I just realized something.

I was all shipping Meenah/John after their recent cuteness, and it completely slipped my mind that in the B2 universe, her alternate self was the adoptive grandma of his alternate self! Granted, it was implied that Condy was a predictably awful mother figure, but considering how well-adjusted Poppop turned out, maybe they got along okay. But anyway, connections! Wacky serendipity! Is one of the many things I like about Homestuck.

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Still working on those Homospunk icons.

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 02:20:14 GMT

How bad has my Homestuck nerdery gotten?

I'm currently building a Minecraft version of the Alterniabound game. It's almost finished and it's gonna be SWEET AS FUCK.

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Well that was trippy.

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 00:08:27 GMT

Hussie, I continue to be impressed by how dedicated you are to fucking with your readership's heads.

( Think of how much time and effort must have gone into those spoilers )

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Homestuck: 7923-7991

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 03:47:29 GMT

Guys, I think I'm actually starting to ship Vriska/Hussie. :F

Okay but seriously, some commentary on the latest escapades of the pir8 crew.

( Scurvy nautical grog-stained spoilers; also, city planning and necromancy )

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SunIsUp: Examine strange webcomic thing.

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 03:37:17 GMT

Some more Hamsteak ponderings:

-Why don't the Carapacians understand how Quest Beds work? We've seen this a couple times: future!WV watched John die on his Bed and assumed he was dead for good, Jack killed John on his Bed without realizing he was giving his enemy a huge power boost, and later he laid Jade to rest on her Bed without realizing that it would resurrect her. My guess is that the game keeps the Agents in the dark about Quest Beds in order to keep things fairer. It prevents the Dersites from sabotaging or booby-trapping the Beds, and also prevents the Prospitians from guarding them. There was one Agent who did know about the Beds — Snowman, who urged Vriska to mind-control Tavros into killing her in order to speed up the process. However she knows more because she's a queen, or maybe she found out about the Beds after getting exiled, or maybe Scratch told her.

-During the 3-year voyage, we see some imps watching a movie with John, Jade, and friends. Why aren't the imps hostile anymore? Theory 1: Because the King and Queen are dead, and Jack has permanently ditched town, so there's nobody to lead the enemy forces anymore. Theory 2: Because the game was paused by the Scratch, as evidenced by the Denizens going back to sleep.

-In the Fruity Rumpus Asshole Factory, Karkat mentions that Vriska and Terezi have killed both Dave and John once apiece. How did he know about that? We know that Terezi killed Wise Guy John and Kiwi Dave, and Vriska killed Alpha John (on his Quest Bed) and Red Plush Dave (via DD). Terezi probably told Karkat about Wise Guy John (since it proved the immutability of the timeline) and he might have also seen or heard about her screwing over Kiwi Dave. (He also watched Kiwi Dave's death, but that was after the FRAF chat.) As for Vriska's kills, the only explanation I can think of is that she bragged about them to Karkat. However, she can't have told him many details about Red Plush Dave's death, because otherwise Karkat would've found out that Vriska created Bec and Bec Noir, and he would've completely flipped his lid.

-How many of the trolls knew about Aradia's death prior to playing Sgrub, and why did she keep it a secret from the rest? Vriska, Terezi, Sollux, and Equius knew about it, but Nepeta didn't, and Karkat's dialogue implied that he didn't either. I guess Aradia could've just not bothered to mention it to those in the dark, especially since she lives far away from them, but it seems odd that the news didn't spread through the Trollian gossip grapevine.

-Jade and Jake both grew up alone on a jungle island, with their sole human companion dying early on and only animals for company afterward, so why is Jake so much more socially inept than Jade? The other day I had an epiphany about this puzzler: Because Jade spend a huge chunk of her childhood on Prospit. Her dreamself woke up very early so she had plenty of time to make friends with all the chess people. Granted they're a little odd, but it's better than nothing. On the flip side, Jake's dreamself was killed before he ever woke up, so he just had the wild beasties for company.

I STILL HAVE NO HOMESTUCK ICONS WHAT THE FFFFARARAHARRHHGH

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Bow down to your new wank overlord

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 20:40:08 GMT

AHAHAHAHAHAHA OH GOD

Fandom Wank has discovered what might be the greatest wank ever. As the write-up put it, this wank combines elements of His Wife A Horse, the Snapewives, and My Ponies Hate You.

In summary: In MLP fandom, Brony A politely requests that Brony B stop drawing furry porn of Twilight Sparkle because Brony B is engaged to marry her on the astral plane. Did I mention that Brony A has a Twilight plushie that he considers to be the physical manifestation of Twilight? And that he carries the plushie around town with him and takes it out to restaurants with him? And there's a whole group of MLP fanboys who have similar astral plushie relationships and some of them do... things to their plushies?

Common sense dictates that this all has to be the work of a troll, but common internet sense states that this sort of batshit is nothing new on the web, and this saga's level of detail makes trolling unlikely. Either way, all I can do is laugh my butt off and bask in the glow of this wank's glorious splendor.

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Upd8: Everyone is basketcases

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 04:19:18 GMT

Ugh, I really need to stop this "write a post every single time Homestuck updates" nonsense. Maybe when Hussie stops focusing on ALL MY FAVORITE THINGS AT ONCE.

( I want to drunkenly flop my arm around this update and cry into its shoulder, à la like half the freaking cast at this point )

Edit: Ahahahaha oh god, I can't unsee it — that chop-chop gesture Karkat's making combined with his facial expression reminds me of that thing John was doing when he was trying to figure out how Jade and Davesprite get their mack on. These dorks, I swear.

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Oh my god more Homestucking just stop

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 19:11:16 GMT

After doing some Tumblr-surfing, mostly looking for femslash art because what the fuck else would I be doing on Tumblr:

-I'm seeing some people being all "Omg how can you still ship ( spoiler ) after the latest updates revealed it to be dysfunctional and toxic! You must be a really terrible person!" It takes me back to those halcyon days in BSG fandom when people would get all pearl-clutchy at the fact that some fans shipped Kara/Leoben. Would this be an appropriate time to do a Fallout parody?

"Fandom... fandom never changes..."

Seriously people, if you can't wrap your head around the concept of shipping a dysfunctional/abusive fictional relationship because it's a glorious twisted trainwreck, then you don't belong in fandom. And you certainly don't belong in Homestuck fandom, where those kind of ships are common and frequently canon.

-There's also been some debate about whether ( spoiler ) is in fact a dysfunctional/abusive relationship, or whether it's totally normal in context. I think it's pretty clearly the first one. ( Elaboration )

-Prior to the latest updates, there was some speculation that ( spoiler ) happened because of magical mind-control, specifically that ( spoiler ) I was very relieved when this turned out not to be the case, because characters having agency and making bad decisions of their own free will and their friends having to deal with that fact is much more interesting than the old "easily fixed brain-washing" chestnut.

-There was also one detail from the update that had a lot of people freaking out and me just confused: ( spoiler )

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Upd8: Faygo is a helluva drug

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 17:52:32 GMT

OH GOD THEY'RE SO ADORABLE YOU GUYS I CAN'T EVEN DEAL

( asdfjdhjfhdhjkdhdf spoilers )

Also: Karkat tantrum bingo

Also also: WHY DON'T I HAVE ANY HOMESTUCK ICONS YET????? *smacks self*

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Upd8: In which Aranea has some more nerdgasms

Sun, 17 Mar 2013 01:18:19 GMT

First of all, I'm still over the moon that ( spoiler )

Second, I was irl laughing out loud at the second page because: ( spoilolz )

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Taking "upd8" more literally than usual

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 18:42:08 GMT

Somebody on Tumblr pointed out that since Aranea's the one expositing, Hussie's been giving us updates in batches of 8 pages at a time. :O

Somebody else on Tumblr made this observation: ( spoilers )

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MSPA Reader: Ship all the things

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 23:14:38 GMT

Let's talk about SHIPPING!

Homestuck, with its bisexual trolls and endless doppelgangers, is basically a multishipper's paradise, to the point where it can get kind of confusing. So after I made a flowchart of canon relationships in Homestuck, I made one for all my ships.

OH GOD THERE'S SO MANY WHAT THE HELL

(Purple means vacillating between red and black.)

And that isn't even all of them. I also ship All The Ladies/All The Ladies, but most of those wouldn't fit on here.

So now that I've organized (?) them, it's time to gush about them all.

( Starting in the upper right )

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Trolls sure are interesting!

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 22:25:04 GMT

Some more Homestuck ponderings, in list form:

1. Why did Kanaya and Equius pick that particular moment to replace Tavros's legs? Why did they wait until after they'd finished the game and were stuck on the meteor thinking they were going to die soon anyway? Not that the robo-legs would have helped him in-game much, since Vriska's rocket-car and his animal-communing powers already took care of his transportation and combat needs respectively. My only theory is that Kanaya was sick of Karkat being sleep-deprived and cranky all the time, and she figured a nice bloody chain-sawing would terrify him into unconsciousness for a while.

2. Why didn't Kanaya kill *SPOILER* when she had the chance? ( 3x combo showdown )

3. How did the carpenter bots know what kind of house to build Karkat? ( Karkat's heritage )

4. Lately I've been spending a lot of time playing through the three Meenah-bound games from Act 6, Intermission 3. Like most people (I assume), I totally tuned out Kankri's endless word-vomit the first time around, but on a replay, it occurred to me that there was some pretty interesting world-building stuff buried under all that pompous bullshit, so I did my best to unearth it. Granted, I don't know how much of this stuff is canon and how much is just Hussie doing his keymash thing. But whatever, imma just roll with it.

( Sexuality, lifespan, and the caste system )

5. Somebody on TV Tropes made an astute observation about why the trolls' storyline abruptly turned into a slasher flick: ( No more slime )

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Gotta pay closer attention to my relationship flowchart

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 07:13:53 GMT

Haha I must be really slow on the uptake, but I just realized another reason why Vriska's recent actions are especially horrible, even by normal Vriska standards: ( spoilers )

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Homestuck: Piratey Updates

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 19:15:53 GMT

I'm all caught up on Homestuck. Now I'm spending my days obsessively refreshing the MSPA homepage in hopes of new updates, and whenever an update materializes, I immediately go off and obsessively search for fanart of it.

I MAY HAVE A PROBLEM, GUYS.

Speaking of updates (or upd8s as Tumblr calls them), have some commentary:

( yo ho yo ho a pir8te ghost troll's life for me )

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Homestuck: Deleted Scenes

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 07:26:35 GMT

Homestuck-related think piece for the day: At what point did the other trolls find out about Karkat's blood color?

On the meteor, Equius mentions something about Karkat having freakish blood, implying that it's common knowledge by that point, which makes sense because it'd be pretty hard to buy Karkat making it through a 600-hour campaign without sustaining a single flesh wound. Honestly, I'm surprised the trolls didn't find out much sooner — there was that scene early in the campaign where Sollux gets Glubbed to death and Karkat bursts into tears. Tears that are pretty obviously red. However, the only people who could see him at that moment were Jack (who already knew and didn't care), Terezi (his server, who already knew), and Gamzee, who was a) stoned as usual and b) distracted by Eridan pestering him. So it's possible that Gamzee just didn't notice Karkat's red tears. Or maybe it's a plot hole.

I'm also wondering how many of the other trolls already knew about Karkat's blood color before it was officially revealed, besides Terezi. Sollux and Aradia are both psychics, and Aradia's in contact with her numerous doomed robo-selves, some of whom witnessed Karkat get stabbed to death in alternate timelines, so it seems likely that Aradia knew about it well in advance.

Speaking of Sollux's first death, I'm also curious about what exactly caused the Vast Glub. Obviously it was tied in with the Curse Virus and the lusii all dying, but I have to wonder what could have possibly been so powerful that it killed off Feferi's city-sized monstrosity of a lusus.

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Homestuck: Act 6, Intermission 5

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 19:26:55 GMT

OMG the latest Homestuck updates!!! My eyes are just big hearts right now! :D

( BFF-shipping ahoy )

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Homestuck: Act 5.1, 5.2, and Intermissions 6.1, 6.2, and 6.3

Sun, 17 Feb 2013 04:20:56 GMT

Welp, I read all of Act 5 and watched Cascade. And then I read all the Act 6 Intermissions so that I could see what everyone was up to Post-Scratch. I'm feeling kind of dazed after pumping all that information into my brain.

And lol, I just friended a bunch of people on an anime/manga friending meme, and the first thing I post about is Homestuck, wark wark. I plan these things out so well.

I'm really glad I went into Act 5 Part 2 spoiled for all the deaths because Christ, this series is almost as trigger-happy as JoJo's Bizarre Adventure! I counted and from 4900-5800, a nine hundred page span, Hussie killed 17 characters! And two of those were the same person, and two more were alt versions of the same person. Okay, so 6 of those 17 people got revived, but that's still a pretty hefty casualty count. For a while there, the trolls' subplot had turned into an honest-to-god slasher movie!

My brain's a little too fuzzy to write much in the way of commentary (especially since Homestuck is complicated and deceptively lengthy that I don't even know where to start) but I have one observation regarding how Jack Noir was able to enter the trolls' game session: ( spoilers )

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An Unlikely Duo

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 05:48:08 GMT

I'm well into the Hivebent arc and enjoying it immensely, but I'm particularly amused by this conversation:

CA: wwhatEVVER you are so the vvillage twwo wwheel devvice wwhen it comes to auspisticing
[...]
GA: Can You Just For A Moment Entertain The Thoughts Of One Untouched By Megalomaniacal Derangement And Tell Me Why Id Want To Assist You With That

I love Kanaya's super serious and precise way of speaking. Also it's weird seeing these two having a relatively pedestrian conversation together, considering the spoilery stuff that happens between them later on. *attempted vagueness*

Edit: Whoops, should have finished reading to the end of the conversation before I posted because:

CA: wwhat did she say
CA: or glub or wwhatevver
GA: Something About Longing To Touch You Indiscretely
CA: WWWWHAT
GA: And That Shes Basically In The Scarlet Throes For You
GA: As Deep In The Flushed Quadrant As One Can Be

Again, knowing what I know about future events, THIS IS TERRIFYING. Kanaya what are you doingggggg

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Karkat and Dave attempt to negotiate polyamory; homoeroticism ensues.

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 10:19:42 GMT

KARKAT: DO YOU REALLY THINK YOU COULD PULL THE WOOLBEAST MATERIAL OVER THE EYES OF A HARDENED VETERAN OF ROMANTIC STUDIES?
DAVE: we have one of those???

Okay clearly I've been jumping around in the Homestuck canon and have completely abandoned any attempts to stay spoiler-free. But I don't care, because this conversation is one of the greatest things ever to exist. I just OHGOD sadfjkfdsj the more I read, the harder I ship these two blockheads, partly because they're gloriously terrible for each other and partly because they're the two members of the cast who are completely incapable of shutting their pieholes, with consistently hilarious results. Add to that Dave's tendency towards Freudian imagery and you end up with:

DAVE: this book is now like
DAVE: our fight fueled ouija board of cock

DAVE: thats the spooky thing about penis ouija you can never be sure who did the dicks

KARKAT: THIS ALTERCATION IS BECOMING UNCOMFORTABLY PHYSICAL, GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME.
DAVE: what are you talking about
KARKAT: YOU KNOW WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT.
DAVE: shut up and draw another penis

I mean, whenever two guys are fighting over the same girl, there's always going to be some level of homoeroticism flying around, but there usually isn't, y'know, THIS MUCH. To the point where Kanaya starts having auspistice pangs because she understandably concludes that the boys are rapidly heading towards a disastrous hatefucking session.

Dedication to D/T/K ship = CEMENTED.

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