#in-universe. from a doylist perspective that game fucks

[whencartoonsruletheworld]

so what do yall think it means that theres a map of the layout of fazbear frights down in cnc's fnaf one pizzeria, a good 50 years broute fazbear frights is created?

ai-generated amusement park attraction would explain why fazbear's fright sucked so bad

[goldeaglefire1]

so. played the Pristine Cut a few days ago (not the first time I've played Slay the Princess, for the record; I actually got into it like a month ago and have kinda just. lurked in the background, not making any posts about it. so uh. hi guys) and. GOD this game is good for so many reasons, with even more reasons being added by the Pristine Cut, and I know a lot of people have made posts about how good Happily Ever After is already, but, since I haven't seen anyone post about it from the angle I'm looking at it...y'all mind if I ramble about how good the Happily Ever After route is from a narrative perspective. trick question, I wasn't asking; I'm going to ramble about how good the Happily Ever After route is from a narrative perspective.

so! let's talk about the Damsel for a minute. this is all fairly obvious stuff but stick with me here; we need to lay the groundwork for the main discussion. the Damsel, from a purely Doylist perspective, is the archetypical "damsel in distress" trope - the girl at the end of the villain's lair who has no agency of her own and exists purely as a reward for the hero completing his journey and beating up the villain (before you get mad, I know the Damsel is not actually like this in-universe, and that fact is actually a surprise tool that will help us later, but, again, looking at this from a purely Doylist perspective: outside the world of Slay the Princess, not in it) - fundamentally, she's there to make you happy. the Shifting Mound changes based on perception, and by treating her as the archetypical damsel in distress in Chapter 1, she actually becomes one come Chapter 2, with all her hard, unconventional edges like, to pick a random example here, "the capacity to horrifically self-mutilate herself," being sanded away for a perfect storybook ending. that's what you wanted, after all.

and, if you take everything at face value, that's exactly what you get! if you follow the Voice of the Smitten's advice and completely ignore the Narrator's nonsense about how she'll "end the world" or something, you will get exactly what you asked for, because, well. that's all there is to it! there is no deeper story here, it's just "hero saves princess, the end," end scene, move on to the next princess. but that's the Damsel route, and we're here to talk about the Happily Ever After route. and in order to properly get the Happily Ever After route, you have to horribly fuck up the extremely simple narrative presented before you. so, how do you do that? two ways - either try to question the princess's character and see what underlying motives she has, or, the method I'm choosing to focus on (both because it's the one I got when I first got the Happily Ever After route and because it better illustrates my point) - when you get near the end of the Damsel's story, right as you're about to get your Happily Ever After...you listen to the Voice of the Hero. because while the Smitten may be ignoring literally everything the Narrator says, the Hero has not been doing that, and quite frankly has some concerns about the potential end of the world thing. if she really can end the world...well, she just wants to make us happy, right? so surely nothing will go wrong if you just decide to stay in the cabin forever! it's a perfect compromise!

spoiler alert: it is not a perfect compromise. it is in fact as far from a perfect compromise as you can possibly get. makes sense, really, as there are no real compromises in Slay the Princess - you can either choose to trust the Narrator in any given route, trust the Princess in any given route, or you can choose, to quote the Contrarian in the Apotheosis, the third option that nobody wants. and the only two times the third option is any good is, well, when you're very intentionally spiting both parties - hi Contrarian - and when there's an actual third party you can appeal to, as is the case at the end of the game. every other time? you will be massively punished by the narrative for trying to find another option. try the "let's keep the princess in the cabin" maneuver in chapter 1? you get the Nightmare. try to be a smartass and avoid the "slay the princess/save the princess" issue altogether? you get the Stranger.

hell, every chapter 3 is ultimately the result of you not playing the role you're supposed to in the narrative (aside from the Razor who forces you to go to a chapter 3 no matter what but she doesn't count). if you play the role you're given in chapter 2, you'll be fine! for example - did you get the Spectre? congratulations! you get the Voice of the Cold, a cold-blooded killer - except, hmm...the princess is already dead, so no one to kill there...but there is the Narrator, who you're fairly mad at for the frankly terrible reward for doing your damn job, so how do you kill him? easy - take the princess out into the world and let her world-destroying properties do the job for you. did you get the Beast? congratulations! you get the Voice of the Hunted, a meek prey animal trying to avoid a massive predator...except, well, bad news, boss - you're the only food around here, so you're going to have to get eaten. sorry man. did you get the Nightmare? congratulations! you get the Voice of the Paranoid, a nervous wreck who, frankly, does NOT want to be here, and, well. honestly, do you expect to be able to save the world? the fact that you're even managing to stand up next to this eldritch abomination is a miracle; you might as well just let her out, because, frankly, who would blame you? and so on and so forth.

the Damsel's narrative is extremely simple. you get the Voice of the Smitten, a classic, overly dramatic, simple hero to match the simple princess you're given. your job is to swoop in, sweep her off her feet, and leave. that's it. that is all there is to it. the Narrator's talk about her ending the world does not fit into this narrative, so you have to discard it. after all, why would the hero release a world-ending monster into the world? that's preposterous! he must be lying, obviously. but, by giving the Narrator the benefit of a doubt, or trying to dig deeper into the Damsel's narrative role and find depth when there is none, you expose the cracks in that narrative...and chief among those cracks is that the Damsel is not the simple character her narrative role wants her to be.

I'm not going to do a full character analysis on the Damsel because that's not the point of this post, but even on the most surface-level reading, the Damsel has two very clear desires - she wants to make you happy, and she wants to be free. and, yeah, that's fairly straightforward, but it's more than nothing, which, ah, doesn't exactly bode well. after all, the Damsel's narrative role is that of the damsel in distress, a role most known for, very notably, having no agency, and here you are, dangling her freedom right in front of her face and snatching it away, and quite frankly, that sucks! she wants to be free! she wants to be free a LOT more than she wants to make some stranger she barely knows happy, and while normally those two desires have no conflict with each other, now they do, and while the chapter 1 princess could have done something about this situation and gone Nightmare on your ass, being a blank slate as far as the narrative goes, that's not an option anymore - you've locked her into her narrative role, now, and as a damsel in distress, she can't do shit. the worst she can do is be mildly upset but otherwise have zero objections to your proposal

luckily (or, well, unluckily depending on your point of view), that's enough for you to get your proper comeuppance in the form of Smitten. poor, poor Smitten - unlike the Damsel, he really is as simple as he appears to be on the surface. even on other routes, he is always, always madly in love with the princess, no matter how she looks or acts, and all he wants is to make her happy. a simple character for a simple narrative, who, conveniently, is NEVER forced to question the Princess' role in that narrative...until now. until you forced the fact that she is NOT the simple damsel she's supposed to be directly in his face, and that she's unhappy with your decision, well. that can't be right. she can't be unhappy, we're supposed to make her happy no matter what! something's clearly wrong here - it can't be the princess, because blaming the princess for anything is inherently not an option for Smitten; it's not in his nature. it can't be us, or at least he can't figure out how it could be us, because he's a simple character for a simple narrative, and the thought of "dangling the princess's freedom in front of her and then taking it away is a massive dick move" doesn't even occur to him, because he doesn't realize that's what we were doing. so...it must be something else. maybe the Narrator, who's been describing her as this world-ending abomination when she's clearly a maiden in need of rescue, or this cabin, because, well, why would a princess be in a cabin? she need a proper castle, obviously! he can fix this, surely, there has to be some solution here, he can make this work again...and it all begins by bearing out his heart.

or, rather, YOUR heart. which, you know, kills us. everything goes dark, and we die, etc., onto the new chapter! or epilogue, if you want to go by the title card. welcome to Happily Ever After, the reward you deserve! you goddamn bastard. this route is effectively Smitten's attempt to fix the narrative you broke - and, in many ways, his efforts can be compared to the OTHER route you get by breaking the narrative of the Damsel, that being the Burning Grey. in that route, you kill the Damsel, and, well, that very obviously breaks the narrative, so when Smitten kills you in retaliation and a new world is formed, the Damsel, now the titular Burning Grey, tries to fix it. much like Smitten can't blame her, she can't blame you, because her narrative role doesn't allow it, and she doesn't blame herself, because she did literally nothing to deserve that (aside from like. the fact that she killed you that one time but frankly if you hold that against her that's a bit of a dick move), so she comes to the same conclusion that there must be an external force responsible for derailing the story. the difference between Smitten here and the Burning Grey is the solutions they come up with: the Burning Grey, fundamentally, is part the Shifting Mound, the embodiment of change, rebirth, and death. so, naturally, the solution she comes up with is to burn down the cabin with both herself and us inside, finally being together with her love forever. by melting together her and our flesh. which, you know, sucks, but at the very least the death is...relatively quick?

the Happily Ever After route does not give you or the Princess the luxury of death. after all, Smitten is not a part of the Shifting Mound, but a part of you - the Long Quiet, the embodiment of stasis and stagnation. killing you or the princess doesn't even occur to him as an option - at least, it doesn't now that he's outside of you. and while this allows him to get something much closer to what we would associate with a happy ending, it falls apart fast. the same feasts over and over again, growing more stale and bland with time, the same games over and over again, excitement dulling into boredom as you play repeatedly with no end in sight...it's not Happily Ever After, not even close, but it's the best he can manage. after all, isn't this what you wanted? you DID save the princess, and Smitten is a simple character for a simple narrative, so, this is the only option he can think of outside of riding off into the sunset with our beloved. so, this has to be what you wanted, right?

and as for the princess? well, if she was locked by the narrative before, it's even worse now with Smitten. after all, as far as she's concerned, Smitten is us, so all she knows is that, after we dangled her freedom in front of her and took it away, and she showed even the slightest bit of resistance in response, we proceeded to make her already bad situation into a living goddamn nightmare. so, yeah, she is terrified of what could possibly happen if she shows she isn't happy with this, so she's quick to smother any and all signs of dissatisfaction in the hopes that, as long as she seems happy with all this, you can't make this worse somehow. the MOST she does in terms of resistance is wear the Pristine Blade as a necklace, which is honestly more of a vague hope of "if you won't let me free from this cabin alive, then maybe at the very least you'll let me free from this cabin in death? please? on god?"

and, well, you could in fact do that. or, hell, if you REALLY feel like being an asshole, you could decide to NOT break the facade at all. but if you really want to make it up to the princess? if you realize how badly you've fucked up and want to actually make up for your mistakes? you have to let her actually express her discomfort. you have to give her back the agency she's been denied by the narrative - the agency you took away in the first place. and once she finally has that back...she cries. in relief, because she's finally free from the hell you put her in, in sorrow because, despite it all, the facade of a happy ending was nice while it lasted, in a mix of both with the tears she'd been unable to shed for so, so long...and, at the end of the day, despite having every right to hate you...she doesn't. because you DID set her free, in the end. you realized your mistakes, you learned and changed as a person, and you actually made things right, so even though you might have made her life a living nightmare...she's willing to give things a fresh start. and whether you decide to amicably part ways or start something new together, at long last, she'll finally have her chance to dance under the stars.

this is a love story.

[flowers-of-io]

@svedupelle pointed out how silly it was of the Vanguard not to have secured Eramis' frozen body like they did Savathûn's, and it made me realise that Ikora taking Sav's body for storage to keep it from Immaru was the worst, most game-breaking decision in the world. Because now we have the right to ask the story why this idea had never been utilised before: why did the Vanguard never secure Fikrul's corpse to keep him from coming back to life, which they KNEW he would, because the actual Vanguard files noted fireteams were being sent to put him down repeatedly? What about Taniks, or Sepiks, or Omnigul, or any other enemy we saw come back in the reprised D1 strikes (which are canonical!), or at any further point? You'd think the whole mess with Nokris, a NECROMANCER, and then Fikrul--another necromancer for all intents and purposes--they'd at least get the idea to maybe stow the bodies somewhere safe, or make sure nothing remained of them to be brought back in the first place? I know the doylist reason for this (it didn't occur to the writers up until TWQ), but from the in-universe perspective it's so inexplicable and unreal it breaks like half of the story in an extremely funny way. This plot hole is so big it has its own gravity. Just the sheer fact that we now have to accept the Vanguard is canonically so fucking stupid they didn't think about maybe preventing the rife and repeated resurrections of our enemies by simply locking up the bodies is hilarious.

[spider-xan]

You're so real about the part of Miles forigivng Peter and Gwen,bc I swear to god if they make it seem like his romantic feelings are still there I'll be so pissed. Like I'm not saying ppl, especially teenagers dont have feelings for ppl who treat them like shit ,but this is more than being treated like shit.

Its fucked up on a level I cant even describe, same thing with Peter B . Gwen I can give SOME slack, because shes a teenager , but Peter is a grown ass man and didnt feel the need to let Miles know?? Especially when he was all "I had Mayday because of you!!" . Okay, you had your baby because of your dynamic with Miles...but you dont tell him what your 'boss' is up to?? Okay , whatever.

And i also agree with your concern about Margo, I dont want her screentime that probably wont be much to get taken up by some bs . And in a similar way, I'm hoping they dont sideline Jessica and somehow make it seem like she isnt Miguel's right hand. (This worry is because of how forgotten she is by fans. I wonder why.)

I just hope itll be decent, will barely give Gwen's dad any screentime, he sucks in every aspect. And I hope they dont kill anyone off in the worst way possible but I feel it in my bones that it'll happen.

Yeah, like, since I'm not Black, I'm going on what I remember reading Black fans on here talking about, and obviously Black people are not a monolith - for sure I have seen disagreement on the Miles and Gwen ship - but I remember people saying that the depth of betrayal from both of them as white people doing that to a Black person would cut really deep and probably not be forgivable, and I'm up in the air if they were intentionally doing a storyline where white people cannot be trusted if you're not white (probably not); and yeah, I can cut some slack for Gwen bc she's a teenage girl who was in an extremely precarious situation where she was homeless and only had the Spider Society as her lifeline, at least at the time, and she was obviously conflicted, and from a Doylist perspective, it gave her an interesting internal conflict - but yeah, I expect her to be forgiven bc this is ultimately still a superhero cartoon for kids, though hopefully they at least have a serious talk about it instead of it being handwaved for shipping.

Now, Peter B though - lol I don't even know where to start with him bc from a Watsonian perspective, he was awful to Miles, but the writing for him was so bizarre and bad that I feel like I have to critique it as a Doylist analysis? Like, I get he has to be in conflict with Miles, but why did they write him passively believing Miguel (I know he was there for the universe collapse, but that was one case), why was he written like a comic relief man child who didn't treat anything seriously, what was with him not doing a damn thing when two teenagers were being treated like shit, and then he goes home and just starts whining about boohoo, maybe I'm a bad mentor while the two teenagers who are supposed to be his friends are obviously in danger? He was like a completely different character from ITSV! And if you just take all of that as well, that's just how he is in universe, then Miles would have every right to tell him to fuck off.

And yeah, my worry with Margo is that she might end up as the disposable Black girlfriend bc she is definitely not going to be the end game love interest at this point, so I hope I am wrong, but I hope we don't get her sacrificing herself for Miles, even as a digital avatar, out of her crush on him, and then he goes off with Gwen; and yeah, I feel like with Jessica, the last moments of ATSV seemed to be hinting at her changing her mind and siding with Miles and the others, but the cast is so packed that I'm worried she will just be there for 'sassy' lines and whatever happens with the baby, and idk if this is an unpopular opinion, but I wish they hadn't bothered with the baby for various reasons.

They were so wrong for letting that version of Gwen's father live, even though I get the plot reason, like, he sucks in every timeline bc he's a cop, but that's the worst one, and we had to put up with that awful turbo copaganda scene, even though I know it's word for word right out of the comics.

[nowis-scales]

(I keep telling myself, “Oh, I better not wait a month between Echoes playthrough posts again” and proceed to do just that)

The fact that Valbar’s like “oh, but there’s no use standing around crying about it” after this is just… wow. No, Valbar, it is incredibly valid to cry about it. Like good on you for knowing what you need and deciding maybe life like this might help you, but like… the occasional tears are okay, buddy. I promise I won’t judge.

I’m going to have to write an essay on the way this game confronts sexism, swapping between Watsonian and Doylist perspectives, because this is just continuously too interesting to me.

Probably a good time to mention that in my first year of university I took an East Asian History class, and while the classroom was fairly large, my professor would always ask my opinions on feminist issues in varying time periods in a few of the different countries… because I always wanted to know what was going on with the women when I wrote my essays.

I think this probably says something about Fernand, that he’s so smitten with someone like Berkut… like bro. Even Berkut’s fiancée isn’t really that into him anymore because he’s just that freakish about the war. Maybe a bit of a red flag?

I mean, then again, it’s Fernand. He himself is a bit of a red flag. Maybe they’re perfect for each other, who knows.

Oh ho in this game, apparently, yes

Even though the last guy is a generic soldier, this looks like the mean girl line-up from every teen movie ever. Seriously. There’s the leader, her loyal follower, and the forgettable third one.

My brain needs to stop subconsciously memeing everything Berkut does, cause this just played, “Scared of beans, space boy?!” in my head. I think I’ve just seen inklings of the fanbase memeing and/or dunking on Berkut where they can, and now I’m just having these moments where I forget that I’m meant to take him seriously.

Which I mean, I hear he’s a pretty good villain when you get far enough into the game, so I’m sure I won’t have trouble taking him seriously later… but so far he’s mostly just showing up and being mean to Alm, so for now I am giving myself license to bully him softly.

… I did not enjoy this part. Idk if it was me or the chapter, but there was some fucking Fates-level RNG happening here. Also probably because I didn’t strategize really, I kind of just put the strong people closest and then charged, but that is neither here nor there. I mean, it’s probably the reason why I did not have a great time with it but hey. I’m a casual. And part of that is just because while I can think well, I can’t say I always want to lol. This was one of those times.

[arcplaysgames]

okay so i have now been thinking about The Big Twist for a while now

I will admit, when I first sat through the game exhaustively explaining what the fuck happened, I did roll my eyes right out of my head. like, the contrivances needed for this to work are numerous

(the Thieves either figuring out what the Treasure is or faking a Treasure for Akechi, the Interrogation Room weirdly being the same in the Casino Palace and in the real world with no variation, everyone conveniently changing back into their normal clothes when in that specific room, Akechi and Sae not noticing when they're flipped from the Palace to the real world, Sae having a cognitive copy of Reverie that played along with the entire plan (that one bugs me a lot, Sae doesn't know Reverie at all so why-- because the plan needs her to for it to work))

like, the degree of Go Along With It needed for this to work with audience suspension of disbelief.... did not actually work for me.

this only works from an out of universe/Doylist perspective for me. I know what the game is trying to do, they have given you about 80 hours of gameplay and they are trying to make you feel like an absolute badass by pulling off this Master Thief move of faking your own death. that's fun and neat and it's a cherry on top of what I feel is the end of the second act.

so that's cool. but the entire story buckles under the weight of the contrivance for me personally.

but I don't know if it's just because I don't care enough to be angry or if Persona 5 Royal has just, uh, gotten me to a point where I expect disappointment from it, my ire has already melted away. the spectacle of it all is fine. I think the fact the entire sequence is a fucking Mess is an issue and it trips over its own complexity, but whatever, the re-tread of the introduction with full context, the stained glass jump, the way akechi just fucking merc'ed reverie without hesitation, it's all fun enough that I'm already over it.

This twist is an enormous mess, but there are about five other things in this game that I'm more genuinely upset about, this one doesn't even rank.

SHRUGS HUGELY. ONWARD.

[yusuke-of-valla]

As long as we’re talking about antisemitism in video games like

We are all aware that it is INCREDIBLY eyebrow raising that a plot point of 3 Houses is a character going “a secret society of shape shifting lizard people who seek to control humanity deliberately broke up our once great empire to control us and make people weak and also we’re going to randomly accuse them of hoarding wealth despite the fact that that never comes up in any substantial capacity” right? Especially given the added context of later routes that the shape shifting lizard people were driven from their ancestoral homeland after being genocided

And I’m not going to say the game itself is antisemetic because quite frankly I can’t tell how much you’re supposed to agree with the character in question, but NO ONE talks about this aspect of the game when speaking about it critically or how it’s slightly concerning the amount of fans who are ready to jump on the antisemetic propaganda and not think about it and that’s something people should be aware of because antisemetism is fucking everywhere.

Again: I’m not saying anyone is antisemetic, I just think it’s worth acknowledging that, even given the shape-shifting lizard thing DOES have a completely innocent source, from a DOYLIST PERSPECTIVE all the REST of the complaints posed at the church and the lore surrounding them draw on a lot of antisemetic stereotypes that people are just. Really willing to engage with uncritically.

If you feel like arguing please do not bring up any in-universe character motivations, this is really about the writers choices and the reaction of players.

[underthestarlitsky]

your steph green lantern art mames me so emotional holy fuck. cause she does have the power to overcome great fear. holy shit.

thank you so much! ☆☆☆

I actually came up with this idea when I was getting super emotional about steph myself, you know? like I know, willpower is inherent in every bat-hero (hell, every hero) but I just think steph is the most suited to be a green lantern. like imagine being a teenage girl written by chuck dixon...

but for real though. everyone else in the bat-family has something enabling their heroism:

bruce: money

dick: gymnastics (and genius-level intellect)

jason: bruce (and talia)

cass: beyond-assassin training

babs: bruce (and later computers + genius level intellect)

tim: bruce

duke: the robin collective (and then his powers)

damian: assassin training

kate: military training

+ trauma (or guilt), obviously, that jumpstarted their heroes' journeys, but stephanie is perhaps the only one who didn't come pre-packaged with a set of skills that could easily be transferrable to crime-fighting (apart from gymnastics, which is not really brought up these days) (and her smarts, but again, unacknowledged in comparison to other characters) YET she comes with probably one of the purest most honest stand-alone reasons to actually fight crime: being her own hero.

I think it's strange how, if you take a doylist perspective to it, that characters like batman or jason todd are applauded for trying to save others from suffering the same fate as their younger selves - i.e saving themselves, just too late, but when characters like steph do it, in-universe and out-universe they're seen as foolish and stupid and handed fates like steph 'causing' the war games plot, because it's so obviously hypocritical! and I KNOW on a conscious, factual level it's just old-timey misogyny at play but it still IRKS me at a level I can't quite explain.

Hence, the green lantern ring for steph. endless wells of willpower for the girl who would not stop trying even though everyone told her to. in my eyes it levels the playing field for her and would theoretically allow her to find her place somewhere else as well, possibly with people who appreciate her better (hal jordan is canonically good at being supportive to troubled teen sidekicks struggling with their mentors) - allowing her a do-over in a place where recruits are literally chosen for their merits and not by a sad man in a black cloak. This isn't a dig at batman, though - personally I'm very fond of all the random stuff DC has decided to put steph through because if you take every bit of canon and acknowledge it, you get a very emotionally complex character that is suuuuper fun to write and explore. But I think in order for her to develop as a character she needs to be given a story outside of the bats, because she wasn't a Bat™ to begin with, and that's kind of he whole point of steph - standing alone. trying to flatten her into one of the legacy just cheapens the characterization of bruce, cass, babs and tim as a whole - makes them less characters and more caricatures, and makes for less engaging stories overall.

tl;dr: steph should be a lantern and my best friend and I want john and hal to have split custody of her ♡

[autumnblogs]

Day 9: Troll Time

Time to get trolled.

https://homestuck.com/story/1527

This is the first of the events that I’ve noticed enough to talk about in Homestuck that alludes to the Alpha Kids. While Roxy on the other side of the scratch is the one actually responsible for the disappearance of Jaspers and the Pumpkins, at this point in the story, we have some pretty good suspects for exactly who disappeared both of them.

I could see myself guessing that Jade’s penpal is one of the trolls, but it wouldn’t be my first guess. I’m going to pay close attention to all of the events on one side of the scratch that are caused by the other side of the scratch, because my theory is that a Scratched Universe, more than anything else, is really terminated rather than truly being retroactively erased. Too much doesn’t make sense from a causal perspective (not necessarily from a temporally linear one) if a scratched universe is actually erased entirely, or even if it is closed off from the rest of existence - why can information enter and leave a Scratched Universe at all from an outside perspective, for example?

Are Side A Side B teleporters, appearifiers, and so on and so on, loopholes? Maybe it has something to do with the nature of Void, the Furthest Ring, and their seeming exclusion from the rules the rest of Paradox Space is required to follow.

The Doylist answer, which in Homestuck is also allowed to be the Watsonian answer, might be that while a Scratched Universe is *materially* erased, information about it is still permitted to propagate through narrative contrivances such as the author. Fenestrated planes can easily be considered narrative contrivances, but if we use this as our theory, it seems like Appearifiers and Sendificators would also have to be Narrative Contrivances (which I’m going to spell with a capital NC from here on out.) I... actually don’t have a problem with this hypothesis, so it’s what I’m going with. Also, since a friend of mine who’s reading this liveblog asked, I’m going to post a link to the tvtropes article on those two terms at the start of this paragraph for anyone who doesn’t know what I’m talking about.

Perhaps, given the proclivity for the Void to preserve lost information in the form of dreams and memories, and given the nature of Space as the medium through which events normally propagate (as well as the fundamental medium of storytelling from which all other storytelling mediums derive their medium-ness), and their proximity on the Aspect Wheel, Narrative Contrivances are objects which have are shared between these two domains - as objects associated with the Void, Narrative Contrivances are permitted to follow their own set of rules which to someone outside of the universe are obvious, but to anyone inside the universe are a complete black box, and as objects associated with Space, Narrative Contrivances function as a means by which to propagate information in such a way as to preserve causality, the logical topology of Paradox Space, and with them, the self-fulfilling nature of Paradox Space. They allow the world-line of objects travelling through the narrative to remain consistent, even when they would violate material geographical conventions.

This description of Narrative Contrivances makes me think a lot of things could be Narrative Contrivances, like First Guardians, for example, who can violate the speed of light.

This is all a lot of silly bullshit, but it’s fun to come up with theories to describe and predict Homestuck (and future Homestuck works, even though I’m not terribly invested in them.)

This has been a long Cold Open. More after the break.

https://homestuck.com/story/1529

John gets cyberbullied!

Man. Cyberbullying has really gone from being an individual concern to being an apocalyptic issue. Who knew? Maybe in writing the trolls and their cyberbullying as being inextricable from the apocalypse, Andrew Hussie predicted this.

I’m not trying to understate John’s issues by comparing them to stuff like massive social media disinformation campaigns - receiving Death Threats as a thirteen year old is terrifying, and on a general level, the fact that this kind of horrible shit was commonplace in the earliest days of social media should have been a big indicator that what was yet to come was going to be so, so much worse.

I’m also not trying to jocularly exaggerate the threat that almost completely lawless social media has on society. If you haven’t already, check out the excellent documentary The Social Dilemma, and then delete your Facebook account if you haven’t already (and since you’re reading my extremely anti-capitalist anti-patriarchy liveblog on tumblr, you’ve probably already done that. If you have, good for you!) And your twitter for good measure, come on, you know who you are. Mabe your tumblr too while you’re at it.

Cyberbullying is part of a larger theme in Homestuck, another one of those things that it’s Capital A About. As a work that is not only about growing up, but specifically about growing up in the information age, Homestuck is repeatedly about the ways that Social Media don’t just bring us together, but keep us apart from one another. Cyberbullying is one of the effects of Social Media pushing people apart - it’s so, so much easier to threaten to kill someone when you don’t have to look them in the eye while you’re doing it, and when you have the anonymity of a string of alphanumeric characters as a name to hide behind.

https://homestuck.com/story/1537

The Black Queen is a very bad woman. It’s always intrigued me that the Queens allow their counterparts’ agents free movement through their territory like this even on the eve (or the advent?) of full-scale war between their kingdoms. PM is just allowed to wander around Derse unsupervised.

I suppose that if even God and Satan can afford each other a bit of token civility while discussing the fates of sinners, so can Prospitians and Dersites.

https://homestuck.com/story/1542

@zeetheus​ John’s definitely proceeds Rose’s bluh.

Rose sips her Mom’s martini for the same reason that she later falls prey to alcoholism. Trying to grow up without help, Rose interprets the martini as a symbol of parental authority, the same way that she interprets the partaking of beverages in general as being a ritual of intimacy with her Mother. Empty signifiers.

https://homestuck.com/story/1549

Jack Noir’s grating voice is so outrageously distracting that it prevents itself as an intrusive thought in the Narrative for PM.

Actually, come to think of it, *all* of the Carapacians talk pretty much exclusively via narration. I wonder if that’s representative of an altered relationship with their narrative reality, which is the first time ever I’ve had that thought pretty much at all.

I always just chalked it up to one of the quirks of Andrew’s writing style, but especially when we take into account the fact that Homestuck is as metanarrative as it is, and that Carapacians are the only characters in Homestuck Proper who interface with the narrative prompt except for the audience, Andrew, and Caliborn himself, I can’t help but wonder. Maybe as living gaming abstractions, in spite of their limited intelligence and abilities, Carapacians have a unique relationship with the narrative laws of Paradox Space (perhaps in the same way that Narrative Contrivances do?)

https://homestuck.com/story/1569

Riffing a little more on the “Fetch Modus as analogous to thought processes” motif previously introduced, Jade’s excellent visualization abilities and vivid imagination serve her well as a Space Player, but tend to misfire, running wild, and seeing patterns where they don’t exist (intrusive thoughts make her see Johnny 5 in her Eclectic Bass and whatever the fuck mecha she’s about to accidentally imagine, I don’t know, I’m not a weeb.) Jade sure does think about robots a lot.

https://homestuck.com/story/1579

I have to say, I consider Terezi’s manipulative abilities to be genuinely pretty strong. I have never known a better way to strongarm me than by pointing out traits that I don’t know whether I feel good or bad about - it just terminates my thought processes.

Although in John’s case, it helps that he is, in fact, a weenie, a stooge, and most importantly, a nice guy. All these facts make him extra manipulatable.

https://homestuck.com/story/1584

<3

I have no reason to believe everyone in Homestuck’s universe isn’t stupidly badass, but I choose to believe that no one is as stupidly badass as the leads because it makes me happy to imagine that these kids are just ridiculously OP superhumans.

(That said, it’s kind of fucked up the level of violence that these literal children are involved in, maybe I shouldn’t get so excited about it. Should we be enthusiastic about the kids’ triumph over their dangerous enemies? Horrified by the travails they are being put through? Probably both motherfuckin’ things.

https://homestuck.com/story/1588

I think about this page a lot.

Rose Lalonde is a very dangerous young lady. She is ruthless, pragmatic, calculating, and cool. She’s even a killer, and literally just killed two imps before fighting this Ogre!

Why is she choosing to show mercy to it now? Is she just trying to get Dave’s goat? Maybe the answer is, deep down, she doesn’t really want to hurt anyone or anything.

https://homestuck.com/story/1589

Kanaya and Dave have a great relationship and I love them as friends very much. I wish dearly that there was more of them in the webcomic. They have approximately the same relationship with authenticity, which is to say that they don’t have an insincere bone in their respective bodies, but practice insincerity nonetheless to impress someone they care about.

For Kanaya relating to Rose, I think it’s a lot more innocent.

https://homestuck.com/story/1590

The least eloquent character in Homestuck has his brief, and I’m pretty sure only encounter with the most eloquent character in Homestuck.

Poor, poor Tavros. While Rose is pretty much always on this level, it seems a lot more innocuous when she’s talking to her friends, or the more mean-spirited and (relatively) competent trolls, the way she treats Tavros almost feels like bullying because of how obviously pathetic he is.

That said, he turns right around, and invokes exactly what’s coming to him. Y’know as much as Tavros is an authentic abuse victim and Vriska gaslights him into thinking a lot of the bad things that happen to him are his fault, there are a lot of times where he does stupid shit that invokes the justifiable wrath of the people around him.

https://homestuck.com/story/1592

While I could pontificate about the fact that Kanaya and Rose are my favorite couple, and squee enthusiastically, instead I will call attention to the fact that, by way of mixing her metaphors, Kanaya has been the victim of an authorial pun - she’s a Fruit Ninja. (Unless Fruit Ninja didn’t exist at the time of writing? It may very well not have.)

https://homestuck.com/story/1596

As the Page of Breath, Tavros sucks at communicating. Here, he sucks at communicating because in spite of his objectively pretty sick rhymes... he is talking to someone who just can’t be arsed.

https://homestuck.com/story/1602

This is one of those absurd moments that at first blush seems meaningless, but I think helps to decipher the kinds of things that John Egbert cares about. It’s one of the moments where he ritualizes an action that one of his heroes takes - John Egbert thinks that Nic Cage is cool, and wants to be like him, so he roleplays Nic Cage for a little while.

https://homestuck.com/story/1603

We’ve barely met the trolls, and they are *already* using the humans as a convenient method to troll each other instead of staying on task.

Karkat also establishes his love of RomComs before his introduction even rolls around.

https://homestuck.com/story/1618

Conceding ground to implacable enemies is generally the correct means to win in Homestuck, usually by getting them to destroy themselves or each other purely by their own unsustainably wicked or stupid conduct. Only a being as powerful as Lord English is sufficient to destroy the Significance-hoarding antagonist that is Vriska, as she threatens to overshadow everyone else in the universe by her own inflated self-importance. Only Vriska, so arbitrarily lucky, could possibly get into position to destroy Lord English. They were made for each other. They deserve each other.

One of my favorite dialogues in the whole comic. Man, I sure love Act 4. There’s something indescribable about the dialogue Andrew writes for this part of the comic. Homestuck at its best whiplashes from silly to scary to heartbreaking to heartwarming, and back to silly again, from beautiful to ugly, and I don’t think that even Act 5, as it piles up layers upon layers, well past the number of parts needed to make a whole, captures the essence of Homestuck as well as does Act 4.

Homestuck is different in every part, of course, and for everyone who says that Act 4 is peak Homestuck you will meet someone who says that Acts 1 through 3 were peak Homestuck, or who says that Act 5 was Peak Homestuck, or that Act 6 was Peak Homestuck. I do not mean to demean any portion of the work by saying that Act 4 is my favorite. The things I like in Homestuck the most are just the most themselves in this portion of the story.

https://homestuck.com/story/1627

I’m feeling less and less intelligent as I read more and more of Homestuck, because honestly, my theories read less like honest-to-god insights, and more like somebody who just wasn’t paying any fucking attention. Here, Jade spells out basically what I’ve been saying.

https://homestuck.com/story/1640

We’ll pause here for the evening. Reading was a little sparse today, but it’s a good place to leave off, especially since for some of these I wrote just stacks of theorizing.

Until tomorrow, Cam signing off, Mostly alive except for a bit of a cough, and not alone.

[sleepymarmot]

In a media landscape that’s full of overuse of breaking the fourth wall, it’s strange to see a game that doesn’t do that enough.

So there’s all that blatant, crude symbolism. References to American slavery, to the Holocaust, to religion. Where are the people who notice that in universe? Sure, Rose has one line about her reasons for helping androids, and I think in one interview there’s a handwave that the concentration camps are actually not that, nothing to worry about! But that’s so little. Where’s the real public discourse? Where are all kinds of activists and thinkers raising hell because we’ve been through this? Where are the journalists who have been writing thinkpieces about android sentience since Cyberlife first announced them? Where are the sci-fi writers and enthisiasts who have been doing that for decades and are now blowing up the internet with their speculations of where the real thing fits in that picture? Where are the psychologists who warn that having robot slaves that look too humanoid would have adverse effect on people and make them more open to dehumanizing sentient beings too? Where are just the normal fucking people who, faced with something that looks and acts exactly like a human, cannot treat it as a thing, even if it’s supposed to be only that and nothing more?

From a Doylist perspective, these things didn’t occur to the writers. From a Watsonian one, Cyberlife is actively suppressing all these voices. It’s a giant rich corporation, working with the US military. It definitely would.

So. How would I incorporate this into the narrative, in addition to articles or news reports?

Here’s my proposal. Making your case on live tv once is not enough of a mass media support. So in this chapter, Markus would need to secure a human advocate for his cause. Possible choices I could come up on the spot:

Disrupting a piece of Cyberlife propaganda as an alternate or secondary objective. Prevent a piece of dangerous misinformation from being published -- with force or not.

Choose who you want to as your ally (examples in the paragraph above). North, Josh and Simon all suggest their own candidate.

Convince the human that openly supporting you is worth the risk. Ensure their safety in a more or less violent way (help smuggle their family across the border, provide them with some resource, send a group of deviants to guard them 24/7, etc.)

[ladyarjuna]

you know sometimes a look at collections of peoples ocs and i think man these characters really belong in a fighting game of some kind

// And in my case, you’re spot-fucking on!

// The universe I ended up creating for Kerry (reliant on... basically no one who interacts with this blog) runs on a gooey, soft magical center and a primary concept from a Doylist perspective that “what one has done, another may do”.

// this means that the magic might have a soft, gooey center, but there’s plenty of hard candy shells one can coat it with for easier handling.

// AS such there are a FUCKTON of different fighting styles just based on the system of magic you’re using, and then there’s more, and more, and more

// this leads to the second principle, spoken at the start of every round of that hypothetical fighting game:

// “THERE IS NO PINNACLE”