Sing me a bawdy song, make me merry

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

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.

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 )

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

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 )

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

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

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 )

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 )

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.

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 )