#crow strider au mspfa

[artificialterminator]

ARquius and Hal Strider Icons

I made for myself (mainly the Hal one), but feel free to use. Please credit if used though or like and reblog to use.

Credit: Crow Strider Au

[meraki-sunset]

The Strider's perspective of the MSPFA Groupshot📸

You can see the groupshot on mspfa, but it'll be gone soon/might already be gone

Here's a very reduced in size version of the 2024 groupshot. there's so many fanventures featured the thing is masive hahah

[ask-the-druggieverse]

Dreams the only sane one thank god 🙏🙏 everyone slaying tho

Anyway- Where/how is Cross doin 👀

- ALT - BILL: HA! HA! HA! BILL: He's doing bury nice! BILL: Don't worry about him at all! BILL: He's having a grave time with his AU!!

- IDK - Two things, for those who figured it out (not saying what happened, you must think!!!), I planned this WAYYY before Jakei made her trans-coded cross announcement and I felt super bad about it considering what happens. And the other thing is I decided to use that announcement to research some sad stuff about what trans, enby, agender, etc people go through in other places besides my own (my town is sorta safe for non cis people) and decided to implement those onto this AU Cross (my other AU SOPV, Cross is living his best life)

For future TW's when we get to Cross/The past: Body(Or gender Or Identity) Dysphoria, Abuse of drugs(I mean... who isn't in this blog?), and Bill(Also, someone just asked about Bill and hoo boy.... Bill is NOT a nice person in this AU(i will go more in depth on that ask than in my pinned) (I mean, sense when was Bill ever nice?))

MAIN: @inkyu

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[distantdriller]

Crow Strider. Whatever.

[the-mspfa-200-favourites-project]

The Crow Strider AU

Here it is. The big one of 2021. I could even say that it is one of the big ones of the modern fandom of MSPFA, period. It is the one that casts a shadow over any ongoing continuation, and that is because it is what I consider to be the pinnacle, the peak of continuations. Not to suggest that I like it or anything, because I don’t really. Like it? My opinion to it ranges from “neutral” to “off-putting.”

So why, then, call it the pinnacle of Homestuck Continuations? Because it is the pure embodiment of Candy. Pure, candy coating, sickly sweet, fluffy candy. Do you want a story? Do you want anything of substance in your webcomic about your blorpos being happy? Probably not, because if you wanted substance, you would go to the original work. The Crow Strider AU is all about Wish Fulfillment, and also about making everybody happy. This webcomic wants to be all things to all people (see: the wishy-washy way it executes June Egbert, by just going “here’s June. But also John is here as well still! June is not going to do anything important past this point, but she exists!”).

But can I begrudge The Crow Strider AU? No. In fact, I would say it’s baffling decisions to get everybody into a “happy ending” makes it art more than anything, art that I for one feel inadequate to dissect to any level of standard. And also, it being a pure embodiment of what the Candy route symbolized is a pretty nice thing to have laying around. I could never truly *hate* The Crow Strider AU.

I’m feeling…kind of unsatisfied with this review, actually. I feel like I’m saying all the wrong things, communicating myself in a less-than-stellar way. I think that The Crow Strider AU is a compelling piece of fandom detritus that is compelling because of what it says about the broader Homestuck Fandom and what that fandom wants out of it’s source text, and all the contradictions between the two. That is what I fully think about the Crow Strider AU, as simply put as I can muster today, because I am feeling rather inadequate today for writing out sentences in an easily understood manner, so I am just going to just stop this review entirely now.

[rogueofrageedits]

why didnt the crow strider au use typing quirks? do we know?? its a weird choice

[davekat-sucks]

I have my criticisms of CSAU, even though it's my favorite AU of HS, but my favorite part is Feferi and Fefeta by extension, I really loved the author making Feferi face Condesce and Fefeta being A REAL CHARACTER bonding with Erisol.

That one really is an awesome moment.

[homestuck-book-club]

Week 5!!

We r starting with the new hs^2 update meaning this week is technically 8 days

16th April (Wednesday) - HS^2 pages 602-614

17th April (Thursday) - 1823-1892

18th April (Friday) - 1893-1962

19th April (Saturday) - 1963-2023

20th April (Sunday)- 2024-2102

21st April (Monday)- 2103-2172

22nd April (Tuesday)- 2173-2242

23rd April (Wednesday)- 2243-2312

[derseprinceoftbd]

In honor of the new Upd8, here's the updated version of my Personal Homestuck Explainer.

An explainer for Homestuck, typed up on a Google doc for Reddit, and now transplanted onto Tumblr, and too long to fit in a single reddit comment. Most explainers I've seen utterly fail to get the tone of the series across, thus not answering the main question I see: "what is Homestuck *and why is it like this*". Why does it evoke the reactions it does? Why are so many things considered a reference? Who is Vriska? (I can't actually explain that one in under 3000 words, it turns out.) But, here's a briefer briefer (heh) on the subject of "What the actual fuck is Homestuck":

Andrew Hussie, a person (now going by any pronouns) then known for various obscure things around the net, made an interactive reader-driven comic-type-thing called Jailbreak where he would draw panels demonstrating the events of the story as dictated by other posters in the thread, putting his favored suggestions in the narration and responding in kind. The happenings and variables were influenced by his own strange brand of humor and set of fascinations, such as rap, horses, clowns, and H!rry P!tter as a cultural presence. He would eventually compile this, along with the unfinished followup, Bard Quest, on its own website.

The third installment of the so-called MS Paint Adventures, Problem Sleuth, was a massive step up in production value, featuring impressive art and output speed as well as evolutions such as some pages being flashing gifs. This sort of thing was considered to be one of the best demonstrations of the potential of the internet. It ran for 1674 pages over the course of about a year.

Homestuck was the followup to that, running 8123 pages from April 13th 2009-2016 with numerous hiatuses in the latter half of that time. It featured such advancements as videos with sound, small WASD-controlled computer games on various pages, and most significantly, actual conversations between characters, semi-hidden behind clickable boxes at the bottom of some pages, allowing them to become three-dimensional and truly sympathetic. Hussie, it would soon be revealed, was heavily skilled at writing compelling and unique character voices and dialogue writing in general.

Homestuck was definitely the most complex MPSA, with a grand overarching plot being integrated into the results of the actions of the readers. The plot revolved around an in-universe game called SBURB with the power to influence reality, sort of a Jumanji with time-travel mechanics that would soon be revealed to be the centerpiece of reality itself, destroying the home planets of its players to motivate them to enter the world of the game and fulfill an unknown grand purpose, complete with millions of fully sentient NPCs. (Homestuck is, technically, an isekai.)

Homestuck has been described as "a story that's also a puzzle", and this lens has gained authorial approval; events are often told anachronistically, as a kitchen sink of high-concept ideas are explored by a man who sometimes wants to show off his semi-deconstructive version of a classic sci-fi/fantasy trope, sometimes wants to infuriate readers through anticlimaxes and misdirections, and sometimes wants to just go off on a tangent about a random movie from his childhood that somehow soon becomes integral to the plot in an absurdly esoteric fashion.

Eventually the suggestions from readers became so numerous and difficult that the suggestion boxes were closed near the end of the first year, leading to less meandering from Act 4 onwards, but the influence of the audience remained; one easy example is a character only seen from the top half initially being theorized on the official forums as using a wheelchair, a fact which would not only become Canon, but highly relevant.

The early MSPAs curated an audience through programming humor and 80s-90s film references as filtered through the styles of Terry Pratchett, Mark Twain, and the Something Awful forums, but the audience for Homestuck, due to the nature of the characters, was markedly different, especially after the Trolls showed up.

You've probably seen them.

The Trolls, initially presented as some extremely odd and bothersome fellows on the internet, were soon shown to be a race of grey-skinned, orange-horned aliens. Trolls possessed multicolored blood in both organized castes and clear deviations, psychic abilities, unique typing styles, insectoid traits as opposed to hominid, near-universal bisexuality with the sole known exception being Sapphic, and a complex romantic system with its own symbols, comically vague-yet-comprehensive reproductive system, and of course, relationship dynamics.

I cannot express how perfect the Trolls were in terms of catching on. Tumblr loved these fuckers and it's not at all hard to see why.

It's also worth noting that this wasn't the only market-perfect part of Homestuck; Classpecting, the equivalent of Hogwarts Houses, featured a 144/168/288/336/384(depending on who you ask and what they count)-strong grid system of human personality traits that not only seemed eerily accurate as a personality mapper, but corresponded to what elemental powers one received in the game of SBURB.

So... yeah. Homestuck was an incredibly complex and engaging work, driven by a single incredibly talented and flawed creative voice, which was perfectly made to attract a massive, unabashedly bizarre/proudly cringe, and notably largely queer fanbase across a younger internet; you may well be aware of incidents such as cosplay failures and inappropriate recreations of Troll culture. The style of presentation, art, and character writing was instantly recognizable and relatively easy to imitate, leading to fanfiction and even fanmade adventures galore, most of the latter hosted on MSPFA.com.

The main site for Homestuck is broken now-it's recommended that new readers download the [Unofficial Homestuck Collection](https://bambosh.dev/unofficial-homestuck-collection/), and starting with Problem Sleuth to ease into the format and writing is a pretty popular choice. The ending is also considered generally quite poor in a number of ways, particularly regarding unfollowed foreshadowing and blatant abandonment of character arcs, with some fans even [making](https://friendlybatteringram.tumblr.com/tagged/altstuck) their own [works](https://mspfa.com/?s=44153&p=1) as [substitutions](http://mspfa.com/?s=12003&p=1). You can find The Homestuck Epilogues (a sequel novel) on the official site, and Homestuck^2 Beyond Canon (a sequel webcomic after the Epilogues) on its own website, but neither of these are very well liked by fans (at all). YouTube also has several dubs of the comic; by far the largest and most popular is [Voxus](https://youtube.com/@Voxus), which has unfortunately slowed to a crawl at around the 65% mark.

Content warnings for Homestuck include: blood, violence including decapitation, clowns, brainwashing/mental possession, dicks-out furry bara art in the background of like ten pages, brief black-and-white nudity, swearing, the R-slur, a joke about an acronym organically forming the F-slur, child abuse, discussed child abuse and homophobia, mocking of the disabled (as an unsympathetic action), cartoonish levels of sexism (as an unsympathetic action), statements that an antagonist is analogous to Hitler, mocking of otherkin, a minor character being a racial stereotype of Japanese people (Damara), a somewhat major character being a stereotype of Black people (Meenah), minor characters being stereotypes of disabled people (Meulin and Mituna), a controversial and prominent depiction of blindness, eye trauma, underage alcoholism, written depections of noncon facilitated by mind control (as an unsympathetic action), sexual assult (an unwanted kiss, as an unsympathetic action), jokes about pedophilia, and child grooming (textually 100% non-sexual, but sexually-coded).

Also: when I said the Trolls type weird, I wasn't kidding. Every character gets at least one color for their speech text, plus a pattern for how they type, generally worse for the Trolls, ranging from "no caps" to "British" to "drunk" to "ebonics" to "aLtErNaTiNg" to WH4T3V3R TH3 FUCK K1ND OF L33TSP34K BS T3R3Z1 1S DO1NG. So that's worth a warning.

And that's as abridged as you can get when summing up Homestuck.

[sunkenmaestro]

Morbid thought relating with the crow strider au

So let’s say in the 3 seconds it took tavris to blow up

One of the times players (Dave crow aradia, or davepeta) came in, froze tavris before their explosion. Placed the needed quest beds underneath and did the deed themself.

If tavris were to god tier they couldn’t explode. I’m sure it would be living hell for them (literally).

But my brain can’t not think of that scenario

[k-arb]

are there any mspfas you read and would recommend?

:D

Crow strider AU, Alternate session, A conversation on the meteor, sburb.exe, and sburb done quick. All of these are really really great. Thanks for the ask!!

[seacatgirls]

crow strider changed my brain chemistry

[greenyball]

important message to all the homestucks: you should go read the Crow Strider AU right now

[voxsymphonia]

this really sums up a lot of our issues with the comic now, even if we did really enjoy it on our first read. this specific set of lines between Roxy and Rose from a couple panels, "you remind me of Dirk, you're laid back" really just epitomizes the level of mischaracterization at play here.

really??? laid back like Dirk??? Dirk fucking Strider, the most up-tight man of all time??? Laid back like Dirk Strider, the guy with a stick so far up his ass not even TRICKSTER MODE could pull it out?!?!?!?!?! what comic did you read, because it wasn't the Homestuck I read!

i mean, if anything, Rose and Dirk are comparable in how not laid-back they are.

and on the topic of Themes, nothing surpasses the cognitive dissonance to me of the Tiaratop That Makes You Good. you know, the evil mind control device that puts They Live subliminals in your brain and activates your subconscious fascist conditioning, well we made it Good now, and if we put it on enough people it'll solve all their problems. You know this symbol of Jane being forced into a roll she didn't want, forcing her into a subordinate position that encourages her to abuse her friends because being in the middle of the power hierarchy is better than being at the bottom? Well we fixed it, it's Good now, it will fix all your problems if you just accept Good Guy Mind Control ::::)

and then, meraki has been posting about like her ocs of different species, and how she's gonna use them in the epilogues as disguises for her authorsona, so she can subtly warp the narrative for them, and then EXPLICITLY MAKES THE CONNECTION WITH DOC SCRATCH!!!! girl, that's the BAD GUY, you're not supposed to be emulating him!!!!

her cerulean blood trollsona is really fitting, considering "i'll just take direct control of the story and cut Lord English out of it, and manipulate everything so that it works out as a happy ending for everyone" is literally what Aranea did in Game Over. has Homestuck's message about the villainy of the author figure just completely go over your head? Did you read the guy turning the website green while he narrates about how much he loves grooming children and spreading his seeds to young girls, and think "the only way to stop a Bad Guy with an authorsona self insert writing the story is a Good Guy with an authorsona self insert writing the story"???

also also ALSO, i'm on a rant now, the whole thing with letting Gamzee out of the fridge, giving him the Tiaratop That Makes You Good and suddenly WOW, i'm ok now, i'm normal now, I'm reformed, it's fine... THAT'S THE EXACT SAME SHIT THE CANDY HOMESTUCK EPILOGUES WERE PARODYING THREE YEARS BEFORE YOU DECIDED IT WAS GREAT, ACTUALLY! like, look at this and tell me it isn't exactly what the candy authors were making fun of!

gamzee's fine now! he can be your blorbo again! all the murder and domestic abuse, that was just Bad Guy mind control! we stopped the Bad Guy Mind Control with the Good Guy Mind Control, and now he's fine! he's Reformed, even!

like, it is supposed to be better or worse that in CSAU, nothing was ever his fault in the first place, so he has nothing to feel sorry for? it's ok guys, lord English was fronting, i'm fine now!!!

ugh. i cant believe i liked this at one point! if people want to play with their grey alien dolls and mash them together, sure, enjoy, but i'd rather something with SUBSTANCE, something that's trying to say something. For all its flaws, at least the Epilogues are trying to engage with the themes of the work it's building off of. What are the themes of CSAU? Nothing bad should ever happen to you, unless you're Vriska or Jane, because fuck these two people in particular? The problem with Bad Guy mind control devices is they aren't being countered with enough Good Guy mind control devices? You can be transgender, as long as you're indistinguishable from a cis person and just a background character for the REAL version of you who's cis? anyways, rant over, good night

biggest homestuck fan red flag is liking that crow strider AU

[eldritchdraaks]

While working on The Crow Strider AU The Animated Comic Dub, we started redoing the backgrounds for Jane's land.

Once the work was done though, I wanted to see what it might look like as a single really long panel, with the text gradually moving to the right as we reach Jane and Tavros. It looks REALLY good! Shame it wouldn't fit the formatting of the comic on MSPFA this way, but I can dream!

Below are the original panels:

[meraki-sunset]

How did you choreograph the battle with HIC? Like did you plan out specific god tiers and the affects in battle based on the classes too? Or was it more just aspect focused?

It was more aspect focused, really.

In animation, battles are choreographed, even in simplified animation like in “[S]Finish it”

I figured early on that with that many characters in battle, I needed to divide them, mix them and divide them again and mix them again, to give a sense of order to their actions.

Even before I separated them by aspect, I separated them by, let’s call it ”ancestor’s connection to the Condesce”

The Alternian rebel’s descendants

The Earth rebel’s family and clones

The corrupted ally's descendant’s

And the Heirs and Heiresses that survived her.

Next, by separating the character’s by aspect I gave them a common ground to attack as multiple teams in rapid succession

In canon, the characters attack mixing their aspect AND class with OTHER class and aspects for more effectiveness, making the final battle look like this:

Which is really cool when it’s 4 characters fighting, but a nightmare to plan, choreograph and animate with 30 of them.

By dividing them by class everyone got a turn to fight, and we get to see where all this character meet when they have the same aspect, what’s the common ground and how to exploit it

The same aspect players FUEL each other

And then there are the characters that don’t have an “aspect team”

Aside from the life and hope players healing and recharging the other players, Sollux was the first to attack, and he didn’t even do it violently, he simply debilitated the Condesce in a second she got distracted the fastest he could. He would’ve done more, but that’s when the seers come in.

Then it comes to the seers, they didn’t get paired by aspect but by class and didn’t attack, their role was the most important one, to choreograph the teams, to get the right order of events to secure victory.

And last it’s Karkat, the leader and Blood aspect, who didn’t have an “aspect team” but at the same time, everybody was his team. Because only the blood aspect relates to bonds, he didn’t need other blood players to fuel him, the other players themselves are the blood player’s fuel.

And producing what people could describe as “inverted red miles” he was the final piece in the choreography

And it was done

In case you just stumbled upon this post, i'm talking about This video From this This MSPFA comic i made, called The Crow Strider AU