#cal with niche humour again

[homespork-review]

Homespork Act 2: The Racism of the Conductor’s Baton (Part 3)

BRIGHT: Also, the prompts in John’s head are back and are making increasingly strident demands. Namely, they want John to follow Nannasprite to the cookies. John isn’t too keen on this idea. He’s so not-keen on it that he fails to notice Rose whacking him in the head with a box. Frustrated by his lack of compliance, the voice devolves into insults. I’m not sure why the Wayward Vagabond is so insistent on this? It’s not like he can eat the cookies.

On the whole this is a really good sequence, I think. It lays out some basic background information for the reader and John, and it’s paced pretty well.

Back in the future, an agitated slip of the finger causes a cupboard door to open in the Wayward Vagabond’s hideout. Out fall a few tins of food and a heavy tome of HUMAN ETIQUETTE.

Rose has updated her GameFAQs walkthrough with the new information from Nannasprite. We’re getting something of a motif here: Cut-aways to the Wayward Vagabond are followed by a walkthrough update. It’s a nice little pattern.

Rose also speculates on the prototyping process and on why the prototypings of other players worldwide have not affected John’s foes, and comes to the conclusion that each client/server pair -- or daisy chain -- spawns its own copy of the Incipisphere, or ‘session’. She’s also caught up in rewriting her work. Couldn’t the reader go somewhere else? Or somewhen else?

Why yes, the reader can. Namely the reader can jump back to Rose’s birthday, where she’s having a conversation with GG.

This conversation reinforces that there’s something funny about GG. She asks about John’s present the moment Rose opens it, and Rose isn’t surprised by this. GG also knows without being told that Rose’s dead pet is a male cat, and she’s been working on her birthday present for John for years.

Finally, she asks what Rose would say if GG told her she knew a game that could bring said cat back to life.

TT: If someone told me that, I would regard the remark with a great deal of skepticism. TT: If that someone was you, on the other hand, then I would have to ask preemptively: TT: Is that someone you? GG: yes that someone is me!!!!!!!! GG: i just thought you might find it interesting TT: So what is this game?

Whatever strange abilities GG has, Rose is familiar with her knowing things she shouldn’t, and trusts her even when she makes claims that sound impossible.

CHEL: Note, also, that here GG is the one who brings up the game, while in an early convo with John set chronologically after this one she asked “lol! whats sburb?” This is not an inconsistency. Again, it comes up later. We end up saying that a lot. Sorry.

BRIGHT: Also: Rose knows John well enough to guess that he was wearing a disguise when he talked to her earlier -- but still interprets his gift of knitting needles and yarn as a subtle jab at her habit of making analytical comments, much as her mother. GG points out that he probably didn’t mean it that way. Later, Rose says she’ll make him a gift with strong sentimental value as a dig at him, but admits she doesn’t really mean it that way when GG points it out. Then again, this takes place some months before the comic starts, and may show how Rose and John’s relationship has evolved.

Back in Dave’s home, the sun is beating down. Meteors pepper the city, and smoke is rising. Dave captchalogues his katana, and sets out in search of his brother’s copy of the game.

Dave elaborates a little on the concept of irony that he and his brother live by. His brother is awesome, apparently. Dave can only hope to one day reach those heights of irony.

The puppet theme from earlier continues, with puppets strewn around the living room where Bro lives and sleeps. Among them are a Mr. T puppet, which is wearing a leather thong and handcuffed to a pantsless Chuck Norris puppet. What makes it a little disturbing is that this is just lying out in the living room, which Dave presumably goes into all the time. Dave’s narration here sounds a lot like he’s trying to convince himself that these things are totally cool, no, really. He can’t see Lil Cal anywhere, though...

CHEL: Other puppets are the iconic Smuppets, possibly a portmanteau of “smutty puppets”, vaguely humanoid nude puppets with enormous behinds and phallic noses. There are implications that they are intended for non-PG purposes. Further implications are that the leaving of obscene material around the home has been going on for all of Dave’s life. For the record, intentionally showing pornography or sexual aids to children is classed as a form of sexual abuse. Casually leaving them lying around the house in front of kids long-term, well, the motive may not be malicious but I doubt a jury would care. It certainly counts as neglect. The popular fanfic Brainbent explored the damage this kind of thing could inflict on a kid in a realistic setting.

Also note, there is no hint of Dave having or ever having had parents, not even a photo in the background or something. The immediate assumption would most likely be that they’re dead, but Bro’s strangeness might also suggest estrangement - behaviour like that would probably result in one’s parents not talking to one anymore, though they most likely wouldn’t leave a child in a place like that if they were around. We find out the truth later, and it’s even weirder.

BRIGHT: Between one panel and the next, Lil Cal appears atop a speaker box. Dave is fine with this. Totally fine.

CHEL: For the record, this is Lil Cal:

Not something one would be very happy about finding behind one, is he?

BRIGHT: He plays a bit on the Xbox, gives Cal a fistbump, and then checks out his brother’s computer. It’s password-protected, but Dave knows the password, and Bro knows he knows it, and Dave knows this, and it’s all totally cool.

One of Bro’s websites is a puppet pornography website. Apparently this is popular enough to bring in thousands of dollars a month, and Smuppets are a multi-billion-dollar-per-year enterprise. Time for our next point:

Magic-onomics - wherein characters’ funds issue from nowhere Half-baked attempts to justify a protagonist’s mystery money can also backfire. Explanations should amount to more than “Somehow Rain had lots of money.” Giving Rain an inheritance, or explaining that she recently gave up her job at a top law firm to pursue her art, will work only where these things feel like part of the world of the novel.

Bro and Dave live in a crappy apartment in which Bro doesn’t even have his own bedroom, instead sleeping on the futon in the living room where he works. Yet they have the funds to spend on swords (not cheap) and expensive turntables. The Con Air bunny prop Dave bought for John sold in real life for almost $1,300.

And how the heck do smuppets bring in multiple billions of dollars a year? That’s a niche market, even if Bro is the only supplier. (Which he wouldn’t be — if it’s worth that much, someone else would want in on the market.)

CHEL: Even if said market is fairly disturbing. If there’s enough people who like it enough to buy it, there’ll be people comfortable with supplying it.

BRIGHT: Their income shouldn’t be anywhere near that high, even with puppet pornography adding to the revenue stream. If we grant that in this universe it is that high, then they should be living somewhere more comfortable.

HOW NOT TO WRITE A WEBCOMIC: 13

CHEL: In order for this to actually work as stated, not only would the puppets have to appeal to everyone on the planet, but there would probably have to be a lot more people on the planet than there actually are. I’m pretty sure it’s an exaggeration for humour, but considering the inconsistencies with their income status as presented, it’s still a bit shaky.

It’s also worth another count, because this is basically a handwave to mean the characters presented aesthetically as poor are still as financially secure as is necessary for writing the scenes Hussie wants to:

WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 6

If the comic was presented as a non-serious cartoon for the whole story, this would pass without comment, but when one’s trying to be dramatic and include real stakes, I think one needs to apply real stakes to everyday things too.

BRIGHT: Then again, it’s possible that their financial status is higher than the apartment would suggest, and Bro just chooses to spend his money on katanas and expensive equipment rather than upgrading. (And/or is lying to Dave about their income.) That might not be out of character given what we see of him later. But overall, this is a mess.

FAILURE ARTIST: Maybe the Smuppets is a money laundering business.

CHEL: A lot of people would read that fanfic.

The theory that the guardians knew the game was coming might explain why he chose to spend so much on swords, at least. He’d know Dave would need them. Not so much of an explanation for everything else though. Considering the weirdness that’s going on, I could imagine Bro not wanting attention drawn to it, but wouldn’t hiding weirdness be much harder in a flat than in a house set off some distance from neighbours?

For that matter, where’s John getting the money for movie memorabilia? Later reveals show the Egbert family originally came from money but they don’t seem to have that much to throw around now.

BRIGHT: Remember how Rose said earlier that she quite enjoyed Bro’s websites? I think that counts as a point for CALL CPA PLEASE…

FAILURE ARTIST: I question how pornographic the site really is. It might just literally be puppets being mashed together with no human body parts. A thirteen year old can surely see that.

BRIGHT: Fair point -- the page we see is teen-safe, at any rate.

CHEL: If it isn’t actually sexual, that possibly makes the supposed popularity level even sillier. Fetishists need constant fresh material and there are probably people who don’t have a specific puppet fetish who would ignore the puppets to look at the guy, but to keep up that level of popularity the viewers who don’t have a puppet fetish would have to keep finding it funny long after most people would think the joke had worn off. Both options say disturbing things about the world this comic is set in and their tastes in either pornography or humour. At least Veronica Chaos appears onscreen with her puppet… (Link contains no porn but you probably don’t want it on a work computer.)

For the record, I think Smuppets would actually make pretty bad sex toys. Plush is a porous material, so it would be hard to clean sticky substances out of it properly, and the phallic noses seem to be too floppy to use for penetration of a human orifice. Maybe that first point is why he brings in so much cash - the smuppets are single-use? People do use plush toys for masturbatory purposes, but usually when they can’t find anything else to use, specific fetishes for them being rare, and generally don’t use the soft parts as penetration toys.

Personally, I quite like the theory the kinkmeme brought up years ago; PlushRumps is actually an elaborate multimedia webcomic a la Homestuck itself. Now that I can see bringing in that much cash. Or possibly it just looks like this, which was made by the guy who wrote Thirty Hs (warning for eye injury and surreality): "Jumping!" (Watch on YouTube)

I could see Bro being that dude.

BRIGHT: And Dave admits, again, that he finds the puppet thing unsettling.

This is a pretty good depiction of someone trying to convince himself to be okay with something that freaks him out. He pesters John to distract himself from the puppets everywhere, and when he doesn’t get a response, he pesters Rose. And Hussie once again repeats the entire blinking pesterlog we read fifty pages ago instead of just linking back to it.

GET ON WITH IT!: 6

CHEL: Just occurred to me; why is Dave so bothered by the puppets? I can’t imagine that Bro suddenly started leaving them around when he hadn’t before - in fact, I believe a later flashback shows infant Dave using a Smuppet’s nose as a pacifier (eww, god I hope it was a freshly-made unused one). Dave really ought to be used to the things by now. Then again, now he’s reaching his teens, he’s probably old enough to start realising this is weird and creepy on a deeper level. But then that brings up the same problem we had with John; doesn’t he have any local friends he could have learned this from sooner? Though I could picture Bro not bothering to send him to school, and we do later learn there is quite possibly magic afoot in hiding the oddness of the Strider household. That’s a complicated theory and requires much more setup than we have here, though, so pin in that for later.

Also, the puppets thing counts for a point of ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?, and Dave is in fact the reason we created that count. A kid in Dave’s situation in real life would be messed up, but so would a kid in the situations of the others (or at least the girls), and Dave’s situation seems to be taken more seriously than theirs, at least later on.

ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 5

BRIGHT: Back to Rose, who’s beating John over the head with a box in a futile effort to get his attention. She eventually gives up and deploys another piece of equipment called a Punch Designix, using the Shale John collected. Since she doesn’t know what it does, she pesters John and asks him to experiment.

Unfortunately John has bigger problems to deal with: His garden is by this point overrun with imps, who are climbing on his tire swing and wearing his disguises. This is enough to snap him out of his Wayward Vagabond-induced state and get him to respond to Rose. They need to get those monsters off his pogo ride!

Fortunately, Rose is able to help by picking up the piano and dropping it on the imp. Less fortunately, the piano does not survive the experience. Neither does the imp.

The pogo ride seems fine, though.

John is reluctant to risk Nanna’s ghost cookies to go retrieve the grist, so Rose uses the pogo ride to transport it up to his room. Then she tells him to go find out what the Punch Designix does, while she works on building the house up to the gate. Apparently stairs cost a lot of grist to build. John makes a SBaHJ reference while Rose recoups the grist she used to build the catwalk earlier, sending an imp tumbling into the depths.

In the kitchen, Nannasprite has produced a lot of cookies. An imp tries to sneak one, and is blasted into grist by Nanna as a result.

John sets out on a hunt for imps and useful items, grabbing some shaving cream and his pogo ride, and launching his telescope out of the window. Amazingly, this proves relevant only a few pages later.

CHEL: Dad apparently keeps an entire cabinet filled with nothing but shaving cream. Rule of Funny, I know, but how fast does this guy’s beard grow?

BRIGHT: His living room is full of imps, who have taken a shine to the Cruxtruder and left cruxite dowels lying everywhere. Armed with hammer and shaving cream, John mounts his trusty steed and pogos his way to victory, which works amazingly well (read: works at all), until he slips on a cruxite dowel and lands flat on his back.

This is incredibly dangerous!

Acting on a polite prompt, John absconds into his Dad’s study, and Rose covers his retreat with the refrigerator, which levels up to FIVESTAR GENERAL ELECTRIC and earns 285 Boondollars.

Further extremely polite prompts ask John for a can opener. Despite the presence of two imps in the study with him, John stops to consider where to find one, while Rose takes out the imps with Dad’s safe. I don’t think that counts as HURRY UP AND DO NOTHING, though, since it’s clearly supposed to be the joke.

Back in the future, the Wayward Vagabond munches on a few pages from the etiquette book. Rose updates her GameFAQs walkthrough with a series of images of John’s house in the Medium. She does refer to Colonel Sassacre’s as racist in one of these, but it’s not really much of a rebuttal.

CHEL: She experiments with building a bit more on John’s house; ladders prove cheaper to build than stairs, albeit harder to use safely. John eventually stops contemplating can openers to examine the Punch Designix, while Rose answers Dave’s angry rant about being buried in Smuppets. I think this may be another point for ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY, because in the context of a kid ranting about his brother’s annoying hobby and his friend snarking back it’s hilarious, and it seems at this point to be presented as funny, but as discussed above the nature of Smuppets makes this rather creepy.

ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 6 TG: i am enrobed in chafing, wriggling god fucking damned puppet pelvis TG: an obscenely long, coarse kermit cock is being dragged across my anguished face TT: Let's put this into perspective. You put up with the puppet prostate because you love it.

Okay, this I think could be a point for CALL CPA PLEASE. A child probably would make fun of another child’s discomfort with non-consensually being surrounded by sex toys on the grounds of not knowing better, but it’s unsettling to read.

CALL CPA PLEASE: 2

John discovers there are codes on the backs of his captchalogue cards, which can be entered into the Punch Designix to make punch cards. Punching the captchalogue card itself renders the item irremovable from it, but the punch card can, he guesses, be used to recreate the item via the Totem Lathe and Alchemiter. Before he can test this, Rose hurls a bathtub through the wall to kill some nearby imps; to be fair, when he checks his PDA, he sees he missed a message from her warning him about it. He messages her back and she says the precarious staircase up to the gate is ready. John is nervous and asks why she didn’t build straight up through the hole in his dad’s bedroom ceiling.

EB: oh come on. what's the big deal, i'll just climb up and go right through! TT: Will you? EB: yeah, why not? TT: Are you saying you've never wondered what's in there? Or why it's been kept a secret from you? EB: well, i mean yeah... TT: Then trust me. You won't be going "right on through." EB: wait, are you saying there's something, like... EB: troubling in there? TT: I don't know. EB: what do you mean? what do you see in there? TT: I can't see in there. EB: oh. TT: But I don't have a very good feeling about it. EB: pfff... EB: whatever! EB: i think i can handle a few more stupid clown paintings.

Well, that’s ominous.

Examining the destroyed safe, John finds a book about shaving, several old newspaper clippings about meteor strikes, and a much older copy of Colonel Sassacre’s book, possibly the one involved in the mysterious accident which caused Nanna’s death. Behind where the safe was, he finds an empty captchalogue card and a proud fatherly note from Dad, praising him for now being strong enough to lift the safe; presumably intended for several years in the future at least, since the safe is big enough to fit John inside it. The note further explains that John is now entitled to the contents of the safe, and provides the now-useless combination for the lock. Further sylladex shenanigans launch Sassacre’s book, killing an imp, and John heads up the stairs, but slips. As he precariously clings on, the hands and jester’s motley of something much, much bigger than the imps start to emerge from the chasm...

Cut back to Dave, still searching for the beta and/or his brother, finding only that one of Bro’s swords is missing. A brief shadowy flash takes the second sword from the wall too.

You know this drill all too well. Trouble's a brewin'.

Dave heads for the door, finding one of Bro’s “ironic” comics pinned to it. The comic in question:

Erm.

TIER: Now that is, as the folks would say, unsettling.

FAILURE ARTIST: This is another work that Hussie created pre-Homestuck and decided to add. It was part of this drawing battle on a forum.

CHEL: It took me an embarrassingly long time to realise that was supposed to be Kermit. I was seeing it as a teddy bear, with the spiral cheeks as eyes and the eyes as ears.

TIER: . . . I was “literally just now” years old when I realized that was supposed to be Kermit.

BRIGHT: Ditto!

CHEL: Me too, actually, it was after I saw it while posting it here. Before I thought it was Fozzie, drawn even worse than the rest of the comic.

Dave is fairly mellow about the comic as compared to his reaction to the puppets, but thinks that he “[doesn’t] need to see this shit right now”. It looks like something a kid his age would either draw themselves or like (I know I would have loved it), but having things like this pasted randomly about your house would definitely be unsettling even so. He understands it as further irony, and thinks Bro is trying to annoy him with it as “some weird gauntlet he's throwing down to see if you will "GET IT"”.

Worse than the comics, however, is what’s in the kitchen. Weapons are piled up on every counter and the sink is full of fireworks. Dave considers this “awesome”, the implication again being that this has been normal for his whole life. He’s really lucky he’s a cartoon character, there’s no way a real kid would still be alive here. When he turns on the blender, a green puppet in it is shredded to pieces, releasing fake blood; inside the eye socket of a Jigsaw puppet on top of the microwave is a webcam, broadcasting the incident. Okay, again, we need to consider how “pornographic” PlushRumps actually is to determine whether this is a problem. Videos of a kid shredding a puppet are harmless in and of themselves. If it’s actually being marketed as fetish material… ew. Dave appears just as unsettled by this as I am, enough so to behead the cam-puppet, so the implications aren’t good.

More Smuppets spill out of the microwave, and then we go back into fucking sylladex shenanigans as Dave tries to collect every dangerous object in the room

GET ON WITH IT!: 7

Distracted by same, Dave fails to notice a silhouetted figure which is presumably his brother appearing briefly behind him, dropping Cal on the stovetop, and disappearing. Dave’s expression doesn’t change on seeing it but he literally leaps a foot in the air. Poor kid, that is freaky. We also discover why Dave had juice in his closet way back; Bro uses the fridge as storage space for swords instead of comestibles, and cherry bombs in the icemaker.

… Okay, where does Bro keep his own food? Both humorously and actually abusive/neglectful guardians still require energy intake, you know. There are later hints that Bro himself is someone’s puppet, but only in the figurative sense.

TIER: Dude probably has spots around the apartment to stash stuff, like how Dave has apple juice hidden away in his closet.

Figuring out how seriously we're supposed to be taking things can get tricky, especially with the Big Thing way later on in the comic putting earlier events in a new light upon rereading (well, mostly just stuff related to Dave).

CHEL: And if we are supposed to take it seriously, how the fuck is Dave alive? A real kid in this situation wouldn’t have lived long enough to be traumatised.