laurasauras-reads

[laurasauras-reads]

Homestuck reread post 4

nothing in homestuck comes easy.

so i'm a perfectionist. not in the way that everything i do is orderly or anything, i am super comfortable with mess and clutter and i don't change my sheets enough. but in the way that i really, really want to do things right. when i play the sims, i try and max out the careers, aspirations and as many skills as i can, because i struggle to imagine a game in which that isn't the goal. when i write, i often think i let my characters obtain their goal too easily and it's a hard impulse to rein in. when i RP, i'm often :O if my character doesn't succeed when i meant for them to (though i love these surprises).

my point is, were i to make MSPA, idk if i'd be able to write like this. if my audience was doing the "right" things, getting the hang of the sylladex or whatever, i'd want it to work.

idk if this is a universal trait, but it's something i admire in hussie

first off, adorable john face!!!

second off, and this is a shameless self promo, i wrote an essay on con air's influence on homestuck in relation to masculinity and i think it's pretty good. find it here

GOOD SONG! and excellent animation too. i was there in days of yore when you saw these loading bars that told you what they were up to as they went and i thought they were awesome then as well

(btw i'm using the unofficial homestuck collection app and it's awesome--https://twitter.com/Bamboshu/status/1323607582724907008)

that app is particularly incredible because it saved all the flash files, so you can interact with these pages as god and hussie intended! plus no ads and you know, fuck viz for their complete lack of support for us as fans.

this animation is so cute omg

i love dadbert's serious business. it's also super cute that he's used john's birthday in his username, total dad move

rose is the best. end of discussion

did i just erroneously say that someone other than john is the best? let's be real, there's some very stiff competition here

[laurasauras-reads]

Homestuck reread post 3

THIS SEQUENCE OF EVENTS OMG!!! yeah, i need to make dadbert 948372% weirder in future.

i love this story so so so so much

somehow john's armageddon picture is even bigger than his con air one. this is an achievement!

it's always rose lalonde loving hours on this blog. ALWAYS. i love every single thing she says ever. i also love john "pranking" her about the disguise thing so much

this is a wonderful family.

laurasauras story time: my wedding anniversary is on april fools, so every year i attempt to prank my husband. on our 2nd anniversary, i attempted to pie him in the face. i snuck in a pie and whipped cream in a can, then waited until he was otherwise occupied to give it a LOT of cream. i held it behind my back, attempting not to look too gleeful and probably not succeeding because my poker face is terrible, and i got quite close to him because i didn't trust my aim.

anyway, he has very good reflexes and managed to catch my wrist before i could pie him. somehow, he did this without making me drop the pie. i pretended to give up and kissed him, then went for another go, aiming to just smoosh the pie in his face. he ninja slapped it out of my hand and then i had to clean up the couch that the pie had gotten all over.

people tend to forget that it's mcconaughey that john's in love with, even though con air is his favourite movie. it took me like 5 years of homestuck fandoming, but i can finally spell mcconaughey's name without googling it

the first of the tar! i talked about chronology in homestuck before, and the retcon is the one instance of future events overwriting what has already happened and i fucking love it. i know some people aren't about it, but i have literally no idea why. it's the logical next step from the time travel antics already seen in homestuck. whatever, i'll talk WAY more about that when we actually get to that point

You wish the RAZOR would have failed to launch. i love everything about this and also everything else in the world

[laurasauras-reads]

Homestuck reread post 2

who gave you the right, sir, to look so fucking adorable??

okay, i've been immediately proven wrong on my interpretation for "bully", unless it's john doing the best with what he has, or if john himself is misinterpreting hussie's intentions. with something like homestuck, all of this is possible! but i think i was probably just wrong hahaha

"plz say yes" says the dude who definitely isn't going to play the game. he messaged john this immediately, like before he'd even looked out the window. (love.)

okay here's something i want to point out with regards to homestuck's chronology. dave calls rose "TT" here, because the reader hasn't been introduced to her yet and therefore doesn't know her name. the second that each kid has been given a name, their friends start using it. the reader's timeline matters more than any other one in homestuck. i started creating a homestuck timeline map, but oh my GOD it was impossible. maybe i'll finish it some time.

the point is, the trolls might have made this universe, but they don't matter until they're revealed to the reader. likewise, beforus really doesn't matter until it's revealed.

when the first page prompts us to name john because it's his 13th birthday, obviously he had a name before then. and that's not just me applying real world logic, we read dave's birthday letter that is addressed to "john", a letter that was written before john turned 13. because john was given his name by the readers and by the time we read that, we well and truly know his name is john.

okay okay so other things to comment on here.

i love dave's assumption that rose is flirting with him. she probably is, though the degree to which that's ironic is anyone's interpretation. what am i saying, she definitely is, we see them talking later. (take this as a sign that i will say shit like this regardless of ectobiological relations, but also this is just plain fact. no one, not dave and rose, not the readers, maybe not even hussie, knew that they were going to be related in the future.)

i also love john's deadpan statement of dave's attractiveness and dave's response. "thank you", it's just brilliant. beyond criticism!

okay idk what the image quality is gonna be like on this, but i want to appreciate the different kind abstrata that are available for the strife specibus. some highlights:

pizzactrkind

lampkind

glovekind

curlironkind

fncysntakind

fireextkind

i'm also glad to see "fankind" on there, because that's what i chose for my specibus. i do tai chi, the fan form is rad!

i love this writer, obviously. i like the fan theory that bro strider is the one who writes these, especially because if he's as like dirk as i think he is, this is entirely fabricated. this is a level of ironic bropinions that dirk could only aspire to

i can't believe i've waited this long to express my deep abiding love of dad egbert. why does he swear on egyptian tombs? why has he hung this picture up? i need to make him 500% more funny in all my fics going forward, because this is a man i want to love forever

okay maybe not, i forgot about the obscene number of jester/harlequin things in this house. i don't know how i forgot, but i did. i'm going to have to make dadbert 800% weirder in future fics, too

Sometimes at night you pray for burglars.

[laurasauras-reads]

Rereading Homestuck, post 1

i'm rereading homestuck! anyone who even vaguely knows me knows that i'm very familiar with the text, but while i've reread bits and pieces a lot, it's been a couple years since my last cover-to-cover reread.

quick disclaimer for those who don't know me: i write fanfic which is definitely regarded as problematic, but that's not reflective of my real world ideals. kinda weird that i feel the need to say that for the shippy ones and not for the violent ones, but there we go. just putting that out there so that no one follows me who thinks that engaging in fanwork is a form of moral activism or whatever. (my ao3 is laurasauras for those wanting to have a peek, i've written a bit of everything!)

anyway, onto the reread! if you haven't read homestuck in its entirety, including the beyond canon stuff and games etc, there may be spoilers. proceed with caution!

john is so cute omg

seriously, his little face. i want 10

i want to take a sec to appreciate that john's con air picture is the width of a double bed and almost the height of a wall

i love the little smiley he uses to mark his birthday

this is interesting, because every fic writer ever including myself writes john as loathing cake, but he's been eating it all day. seems like he's just very reasonably overloaded on something too sweet. there's only so much cake one can eat! and the house is quite literally lousy with cakes

okay, a number of things:

THE WALLPAPER. which, actually, i would also be proud of this. it captures something. i assume that dave could only aspire to something this hideous, and the fact that it's executed with perfect sincerity would kill him

john's programming files are ^cake. the ^ symbol is called a carrot, therefore you can read them as .carrotcake. possibly obvious, given the icons? but still a fun detail

the ~ATH one is similar. ~ is called a tilde, ~ath = tildeath. that'll come up again with the trolls, when karkat and sollux use ~ath to attach their programming statements to the death of the universe

the START button is ACTUATE. i really love hussie's way of using words. it's not even that they have a killer thesaurus, because i have one of those and let me tell you, the words that they use aren't standard synonyms. they're just like this. i wish i could know whether they did have some Better Thesaurus. it is taking great restraint right now for me to not look on my favourite online bookstore to see if they have cool thesauruses.

and of course typheus as a web browser. i cannot say for certain, but hussie gives me the vibes of a plantser. they did these first pages from reader prompts, so they were improvising a lot by default, which doesn't speak to having a rigid outline in my mind. in my experience, it's actually super easy to write something and make callbacks that seem as if you were foreshadowing things, especially when you throw as much stuff out there as hussie did. in saying that, they did stuff like name the kids' browsers for their denizens. so it's hard to say how much they planned/pantsed.

more examples of hussie's use of words. "rancorous". i'm reading all the rest as synonyms of "friendly", including "bully", like "oh, bully for you!" which is a bit out of fashion now but makes more sense in context.

ah, they are in love. (joking. unless?)

this is just an excellent way to begin the dialogue (pesterlog) of homestuck, dave and john have such choice reactions. "try using your brain numbnuts" is a brilliant quote. i also tend to forget that john isnt the only one to forgo contractions. not all the time, but all the characters share some tendencies despite their distinctiveness.

"hey did you get this game you want to play together? not like i'm interested or even want to play with you but you should go check now"

"did you see how it got slammed in game bro????" - this is fucking hilarious, like we get to read this review later and it says literally nothing about playing sburb, plus the magazine is a huge joke. i love that both john and dave read it. i assume rose does as well, actually. i'm putting this line down to masterful irony

[laurasauras-reads]

on alternia!

dammek’s basement is pretty sparse so it was very quick to get through and didn’t provoke any particular reactions. except that omg xefros is way more subservient than i remember. 

i am SO tempted to choose this option but i am physically incapable of being rude like this, i just can’t.

i love xefros’s room, also xefros himself. no intro panel for him like we got for joey (we didn’t get one for jude either), but he’s clearly into stickball and rapping, as well as his more involuntary interests like butlering. 

this is too cute i just can’t!!!

i have no idea why this is so funny to me

i love sloth lusus

oh, this is totally the globe that she didn’t recognise. grandpa has a globe of alternia! that’s cool!

scurrying around dammek’s house is only illuminating things we already know about alternia and showing the cultural differences between joey and xefros. it’s cute and i like it, but it’s not giving me much to ponder. i really do wonder what it would be like to play this as a complete newbie to homestuck and related properties. 

yeah, now you mention it, the nitrams are pretty leadership-y. 

awwww

okay their meeting is adorable. i have friends who ship them and i think because i sped through the game so fast last time i didn’t quite get it. and i really hope that xefros gets some more assertiveness in act 2 because i don’t gel with his vibes, but i can totally see it. 

[laurasauras-reads]

oh my god how did i forget that jude knows exactly what the portal does?! and the key was a. claire’s heirloom, is this what happened to their mum?? or even, is it what happened to jake? i know that he’s always been absent, but given how there’s no pics of the three of them together i had thought jude was too young to know their mum. there’s also the fact that joey has stashed other things in the attic, so the portal isn’t a new feature and it seems like a. claire has been gone for a while. hmmmm!

jaaaaaaaaaake nooooo! this will be your demise, buddy.

first off, stunning. love the design of this thing. there’s not a terrible amount to say because it’s really obvious that there’s two snakes with cherub swirls on them. i don’t know why that would provoke a portal to alternia?

kinda seems like hypnosis juju stuff.

and now we have officially swapped hives!

[laurasauras-reads]

oh no! the face of a boy who just lost his favourite pigeon. i couldn’t get his actual reaction face because it was too quick, but that was Very Horrified. god, he looks so sad :(

the face of a boy whose pigeon is NOT behaving!

finally! a successful pigeon! and a dealt with monster!

i cannot find bread or bread-like things anywhere, going back to the trophy room as i didn’t really explore it properly before.

so at the bottom there’s the black and white dogs, bec noir and PM, and the snake has lord english vibes. in the middle we have a smuppet and a scalemate thing, and is that a dave representation with the sword and the white hair and the red eyes? there’s possibly more going on here, don’t know.

eyyyy

okay i legit can’t find bread. going to have to look at a walkthrough!

omg. like sburb!

aaaaaaaaaa it’s so obvious i feel silly!

okay, key gained, monsters avoided, into the attic!

[laurasauras-reads]

firstly, jake’s thing for blue ladies is hilarious to me. blue lady is actually a slang term for heroin, but i don’t think that’s relevant. i honestly have no idea what this is a reference to, if anyone knows please comment! also i love joey’s reaction to the lamp. fair, honestly.

the kitchen and basement are mostly full of the same “my guardians are inadequate” prompts, which is fair given the circumstances. the basement also had a monster to defeat after switching the breaker to get the power up again. i honestly got too caught up to remember to screenshot!

back in the trophy room and one more monster encounter later, jude remembers that he’s made the puzzle for the attic key unsolvable because he has the necessary marbles. 

why is jude so gung ho about keeping the attic locked? is it because of the portal? maybe he doesn’t know the exact details but jake asked him to keep it secure, that’s definitely something a younger and less jaded kid would take seriously. or he could just like making things impossible to access!

whatever the situation, i love him. SO cute! and on the matter of his being young enough to still look up to his absent pa, he has a not dissimilar speech pattern to jake. 

and immediately after i say that he might not know the exact details we find this. i have played this before, it was just when it came out so a while ago. 

oh homestuck, never change.

[laurasauras-reads]

good god this is disturbing. 

get it? he’s a troll! this is a great reference, i love it, especially jude taking the place of the expatri8

you know this actually reminds me of oxfordRoulette’s depiction of the lord and lady of death from her fic Vanitas vanitatum.

definitely didn’t find this thing on my first playthrough. love the reference to bec and the plausible explanation of their own white dog. there’s other combos too, including the cherub candy swirl. 

“my biggest fan”! of course jake harley can seduce whoever he wants, and it seems that his thing for the movies is a universal constant too. tbh i think that most of the attributes we see in the characters in homestuck are pretty constant.

i’d say this means that a. claire died in childbirth? but honestly i don’t know if that lines up, given the other picture of her and joey. people generally take pictures with their kids while they’re still in hospital though. i should probably mention at this point that i haven’t read the skaianet archive thing and i have no idea if i will or not. seems like if the gang wanted us to, it’d still be available. 

oh jake . . . he clearly married a. claire from a picture on the wall, so you’d think he was okay with the family life. there’s the possibility that joey reminds him too much of a. but i think it’s more likely that responsibility terrifies him and so he delegated it to a. and then roxy (and then bec). 

it’s interesting that joey comments on him having used to be good with animals, basing it off a picture of him with halley that looks really similar to the composition of her and her dog. obviously the hunting thing has made her think that he no longer cares about animals, but it’s not necessarily that clear cut. he could be compartmentalising, that seems jakeish. 

[laurasauras-reads]

details i’m noticing in joey’s room:

that looks an awful lot like jade, but she won’t be born for another year. alpha jade founded skaianet and it’s very likely that beta jake did too. even if nothing else, it’s a company that pops up. 11/11 is a pretty significant homestuck day too. the day the alphas play sburb and calliope and caliborn’s birthday. 

baking is significant! as is the fact that joey either can’t ask roxy to buy her supplies or it hasn’t even occurred to her that she can. pretty sad either way.

manthro chaps are honestly so disconcerting. 

who can’t appreciate a gatsby reference? longing for a perfect life that is unattainable works for this situation, but i think it’s simpler than that. there was an opportunity to make a reference and they took it. 

oh my god, so much to dig into here. hot steppin seems to be a dirty dancing parody; same kind of font, she’s looking like baby, totally a movie joey would be into. same with star avenue. the story keeps happening is a neverending story thing, which featured in homestuck and the phrasing of that title also calls back to SBaHJ. i don’t know what to do with canadian campfire spook-ems, but maybe it’s the monster link. acorn’s shadow is a chapter from detective pony. second mom is . . . yikes. girl’s got some mommy issues.

doesn’t it just?

aaaaa poor joey. the drunk roxy thing, pa being absent for weeks and when he was there basically treating the house as a storage locker. the drawings make it sadder somehow.

omg i’m an idiot, i got literally everything i think i can in joey’s room and then i turned the light on. this is a very typical play style for me.

[laurasauras-reads]

oh my god, i forgot what a stunning game this is! and the backgrounds never stop being beautiful, with the characters keeping that style that homestuck gradually developed and that homestuck^2 has maintained. the movements of the characters are so fluid, they’re kind of transfixing to watch, which is very suitable for a story where joey’s dancing plays such a large role.

and the opening is SO wholesome! i love their dog so much and you can already tell a lot about the characters from this brief establishing scene.

again, beautiful game. the whole house has this really cluttered feel, like it really is run by two kids and a roxy. there’s obvious grandpa elements in the main house (and he’s definitely one for clutter himself) but even they have stickers and other decorations on them. 

it could be because of my own background or the fact that i know going into this that grandpa isn’t really around, but i have a tendency to see such an excess of Stuff as a compensation. like “maybe if i give my kids everything they could want then they’ll forgive me for being absent or i’ll be able to ease my conscience in that regard”. 

joey’s intro is classic homestuck. i assume joey is short for josephine, which is a pretty old fashioned name, but one i really like (probably because it crops up in my family). combined with claire it gives me a classic hollywood feel.

“in no particular order” could be played straight, but i don’t think it is. she’s a puzzle-solver first, which is handy for this style of game. she’s a semi-orphan second, and the lack of parents is a recurring theme in homestuck so joey’s preoccupation with the loss of her idealised mother is right on track for that, as is grandpa’s absence (and yet strong presence through all the Stuff) and roxy’s as well. it sounds like she tries her best, but she’s young and i remember on my first play through that it felt like she was developing habits that would stay with her with rose.

she’s a dancer, which of course is a major part of gameplay, so it makes sense that that comes next. aspiring vet is another one that’s useful for an adventure game, but it also strikes me as very cute; it’s the kind of job a girl who loves animals wants. and she’s a big sister. it’s also cute that that makes the list and i don’t think it being last diminishes that.