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Post by jorpho on Apr 13, 2016 21:31:38 GMT -5
Well, it's finally over. Sorta. Seven years leading up to one nine-minute animation. A rather nice animation, at that, but still - nine minutes?
I feel kind of sad not so much that it's over, but that it went out with such a whimper. Has the fanbase not largely lost interest at this point? There are certainly enough people pissed off about the Kickstarter. All the furor and attention and mad devotion has led up to nothing more than this. What was the point of it all? Will it ever be worth getting so worked up about anything like this ever again? It hardly seems worth suggesting someone start over and try to work through it now.
As it sinks in I grow more convinced that he surely has one heck of an epilogue fermenting.
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Post by JDarkside on Apr 13, 2016 21:48:48 GMT -5
Honestly, everything to understand what happened is in the comic as it is. My Tumblr feed is going crazy with theories and examinations, and a lot of them make sense (while Reddit is just ...something). The real end for character stuff was Collide, the purpose of Act 7 was creating the last moment that creates the stable loop that allows the kids to win and to also allow the events of Caliborn's spoilers to occur so Lord English can exist. There's a LOT to examine in there, from the colors that flash on the weapon Vriska uses to what Caliborn was doing in the cave.
I don't really need the epilogue. It's easy to see where things go from here once you go back over some dangling plot threads in the rest of act six and look closely at the English scene (there's a cue ball and a pocket represented). The fanbase isn't dead either, just not obnoxiously loud as it used to be. The same thing happens to most every franchise and series after a long while.
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Post by jorpho on Apr 13, 2016 22:10:54 GMT -5
Ooohhh... Okay, that makes a little more sense now, and is a teensy bit more satisfying. This gives me hope that if I wait and see someone will cook up something genuinely cohesive from all this. Unfortunately Act Six is waaaay too long for me to shuffle through and sort out all the dangly bits myself. EDIT: At the moment everyone is posting this explanation and that doesn't work for me at all.
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Post by Maciej Miszczyk on Apr 13, 2016 23:29:39 GMT -5
so I heard it's over and tried to catch up but act 6 doesn't stop being unreadable. I'll probably read the whole thing for the sake of old times but it went on for far too long. second groups of kids and trolls is where it jumped the shark.
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Post by JDarkside on Apr 14, 2016 4:12:12 GMT -5
Ooohhh... Okay, that makes a little more sense now, and is a teensy bit more satisfying. This gives me hope that if I wait and see someone will cook up something genuinely cohesive from all this. Unfortunately Act Six is waaaay too long for me to shuffle through and sort out all the dangly bits myself. EDIT: At the moment everyone is posting this explanation and that doesn't work for me at all. It's definitely a fun one to unpack. I like to think the fate of the dream sphere people is that they've been used as raw material for the new reality. Virska's fate is most fitting if she wins at her goal, but doesn't survive.
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Post by jorpho on Apr 14, 2016 8:05:29 GMT -5
There is no way I'm sitting through even a minute of someone's rambling Youtube commentary, I can tell you that much. So, were the four kids actually released from the juju to fight Lord English in some unseen battle? And for that matter, did the eight kids actually fight Caliborn in the first place, or did that only happen in some alternate erased reality?
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Post by JDarkside on Apr 14, 2016 8:30:06 GMT -5
There is no way I'm sitting through even a minute of someone's rambling Youtube commentary, I can tell you that much. So, were the four kids actually released from the juju to fight Lord English in some unseen battle? And for that matter, did the eight kids actually fight Caliborn in the first place, or did that only happen in some alternate erased reality? I doubt it's an endless loop, because we see a happy ending.
What I think is that we have two different timelines now, the main alpha one with the good ending, and one that exists solely so Lord English is born. A doomed timeline used to create the new Alpha. Doc Scratch being dead removes his ability to manipulate the alpha timeline, thus why it's possible.
The house juju is basically a plot hole. Like Gamzee, who runs on different rules because of his status as the "clown" character, this juju has a few properties different from what we've seen. The big one is that it allows not just time travel, but full on stable paradoxes that allow multiple versions of the same person to exist outside the dreamspheres, as we saw with John.
So, when the kids went through the door, the door essentially split them into two possibilities happening side by side so each possibility can exist. There's the good ending, and the event with the kids fighting Caliborn and creating Lord English.
As for how Gamzee got there, he probably got thrown to the current Earth, and because he has different narrative rules, he lived long enough to raise Caliborn and Calihope. Equissprite probably stuck around too and appeared for that fight. The only thing we haven't seen properly is Caliborn ggetting the ring of void. The epilogue will probably expand on that.
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Post by jorpho on Apr 15, 2016 8:10:11 GMT -5
For a moment I was thinking it would be really neat if the very beginning of the story actually picked up immediately after the four kids were trapped, but I guess that didn't happen. I was also kind of expecting there would be another big dramatic moment of sudden captchalogging and things being flung out of inventories – but maybe that will be in the epilogue too. The thought occurs to me that Jade shouldn't be able to use her powers after the Green Sun gets blowed up , but then the end of Act 5 was all about people doing things after the universe supposedly ended, so eh.
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Post by JDarkside on Apr 15, 2016 18:07:15 GMT -5
For a moment I was thinking it would be really neat if the very beginning of the story actually picked up immediately after the four kids were trapped, but I guess that didn't happen. I was also kind of expecting there would be another big dramatic moment of sudden captchalogging and things being flung out of inventories – but maybe that will be in the epilogue too. The thought occurs to me that Jade shouldn't be able to use her powers after the Green Sun gets blowed up , but then the end of Act 5 was all about people doing things after the universe supposedly ended, so eh. I don't think that's accurate. Her power doesn't come solely from the green sun, but her godtier abilities and combining with Bec as a sprite.
My knowledge on act 5 is a bit fuzzy, though. I skipped through a bit because I wanted to follow different plot threads more than others. A look at the Homestuck wiki seems to support this, especially because she also fused with herself, which might give her aspect abilities beyond anyone else in the series outside English.
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Post by jorpho on Apr 15, 2016 23:42:44 GMT -5
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Post by JDarkside on Apr 16, 2016 5:40:54 GMT -5
I really doubt that one. The kids wouldn't have a reason at that point to go back and face Caliborn. They're not aware of how English was born entirely, only that it involved a choice. English already lost in their timeline, so they would have no real reason to face him anymore because their timeline is secure with a happy ending.
If it's to explain Jake's Hope field, that power can easily manifest in moments of emotional weight, so he doesn't really need time to learn it.
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Post by JDarkside on Apr 16, 2016 18:08:40 GMT -5
I just found the best theory on the ending. wakraya.tumblr.com/post/142892873155/homestuck-meta-theoryLong read, but it sums everything up in a very impressive read. Basically, it takes into account he insane amount of meta narrative, remembers a line Dave gave about them being people and people don't have arcs, and gets to the whole thematic point of the series and why the ending didn't feel like a satisfying end to a planned story and why we didn't see the full loop hinted at in spoilers. Basically, the characters are escaping the comic, with exception to Vriska and English, who both desire manipulating the narrative to their own ends. Vriska wants to be the heroine, English wants to rule and carve out his own story in spite. That's why they're on the same side of the door.
Hussie's death in the comic is also why act 6 seemingly went off the rails, because in-universe, Hussie lost control of the narrative.
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Post by jorpho on Apr 17, 2016 1:11:09 GMT -5
I'm not entirely convinced that fits, considering that the house juju was definitely implied to have the kids trapped in it in the end, one way or another. And Hussie has at least been fairly consistent in saying that the comic is ultimately supposed to be a creation myth. But I would certainly be prepared to believe that he lost control of the narrative in general some time ago, and having read that I would now not find it entirely unexpected if the epilogue turned out to be a few panels of Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff. Especially if anything more than that risks starting to mess with people's elaborate theories. (The Problem Sleuth epilogue certainly didn't accomplish much.) It's probably pointless to speculate in the meantime.
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Post by Maciej Miszczyk on Apr 17, 2016 4:56:31 GMT -5
I've finally finished reading. I must say that I really enjoyed [ S] Collide (with some of the events leading up to it) and [ S] ACT 7, this is more or less what I hoped the ending would be. it's just too bad that the whole Act 6 is so slow, long and mostly pointless. I mean, did anyone think that Tricksters are a good idea? or Davepetasprite? or doubling the already huge cast of characters? that aside, I'm glad I read it.
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Post by jorpho on May 9, 2019 21:04:37 GMT -5
I have no doubt there's been a mountain of fanfic over the last three years, and I still haven't touched Hiveswap. But, maybe it's time for some real answers. Or did you think it was actually over? www.homestuck.com/epilogues
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