#and we know HS deliberately references LOTR...

[elkian]

So here’s a fun one.

There’s been posts on my dash over the years about how JRRT wouldn’t focus much on the “epic battles” in the Middle Earth books, because he’d survived those battles and they were awful and he didn’t want to give anyone the idea that he was glorifying them, supporting them. There’s been posts about how an accurate Hobbit movie, I think? would be a musical with Bilbo taking a post-picnic nap in the foreground, while a pitched battle is happening in the far back, too blurry to make out.

You know where this same phenomenon occurs?

Homestuck.

In the Author Commentary, Hussie even comments on the overall lack of large battles. We get John fighting Ogres in the first few Acts, we get [S] Make Her Pay, and so on. But our only glimpse of the Trolls’ Black King final battle is a narration over memory snapshots by Aradia, long after the fact.

The thing is that from the very first moment the readers encounter any troll, the story is long beyond that battle. The trolls winning is a foregone conclusion, even if that isn’t immediately obvious because the narrative is being built over time. Karkat - then only known as CG - even mentions having beaten their “NASTY 12X PROTOTYPED GIANT BLACK KING” in nearly a throwaway line as he exposits about the Reckoning, an event more immediately relevant to John.

The Black King fight is an important event - the trolls had to beat him to “win” Sgrub, to reach their reward (so close...). It really isn’t the kind of event that can just be handwaved... but it can be glossed over. Because they can’t have reached this point without doing it or breaking rules we didn’t even known needed to be broken yet, it’s just a past event for them.

An incredible team made a full animation for [S] Duodecim Rex Angelus that’s worth watching, and Hussie even apparently approved it as a viable depiction of canon events. So why did Hussie skip over this giant battle? Because that is, at the core, not what Homestuck in specific is about.

Homestuck is about a lot of things. God, it is about so many things all at once, and I will never fully plumb its depths, and that’s okay. I’ve been a pretty casual reader from the getgo and most all of my theorycrafting has been pretty base, and that’s okay, too, because there’s no wrong or right way to experience Homestuck imo. But my point here is: Homestuck is very often a story about stories. Meta is built into its narrative in a way I don’t see in much else. So when a storytelling decision or direction happens in it, it’s probably for a reason.

Fights in Homestuck have to have an explicit narrative meaning. John fighting the Ogres is a display of a lot of things: John’s new skill level, the abilities (and limitations) of the characters helping him, the inherent danger of this new world and the knowledge that things are only going to get tougher as it goes. Aradia beating Vriska bloody was a testament of Aradia’s renewed capacity for emotion, and also sets up some extremely important story beats down the line. The finale is the Finale, though truth be told I wouldn’t have put it past Hussie to PSYCHE us all out of that just to mess with us.

Anyways, no particular conclusion here, I just think it’s a really interesting trend.