#or the fact that it's homestuck and homestuck is inherently totally incomprehensible

[dreamsurvivormultiplayer]

i made the mistake of perceiving a hermitcraft homestuck au and as Someone Who Has Done Far Too Much Studying On Classpects I. Now feel. Like I Am Legally Obligated To Think About This. Anyone is welcome to throw in thoughts if ya have any.

Given 26 Hermits, normally that might be annoying to divvy up into 12 classes/aspects (if we wanna be shitposty, technically 17 classes and 13 aspects) BUT we can double up the main 12 and then throw the extra two as Muse/Lord Time/Space which is quite fun actually. Also perfect number for an equal split lunar sway, but that’s for a different post.

I’m just gonna go right ahead and throw Xisuma intooo im thinking Muse of Time? cause yknow, Server Admin. That feels right. Influencing/inspiring the timeline/end from a distance for the benefit of others. But. on the other hand. XisumaVoid... Technically there's nothing stopping us from making him a Muse of Void, which still fits the Server Admin themes (except this time now more aspects of creating a world from nothing/protecting that world by obscuring it/wiping it for resets). Also if the Muse/Lord duo aren’t Time/Space aspects that could play into them having a broken session which fits Season 8′s plot pretty well.

Opposing that, I’m kinda tempted for Doc as Lord of Space? Mostly for shadow items n stuff - Manipulation of space/material existence/physicality for benefit of self. Or Lord of Light (manipulation of knowledge/chance/observation/etc) which does still fit with the game-breaking themes.

Grian i’m debating a class for (hesitantly settling on Maid, Mage, Bard, Prince, or Thief - Mage/Maid for more Watcher!Grian vibes, everything else following his semi-destructive/chaos streak, and an argument could probably be made either way for benefit of others/self). Aspect though, my gut feeling is Time or maaaaaybe Heart (for splinter-selves)? I’m admittedly liking Time much better because of the destructive associations with it, inherent chaos, and timelines/multiple selves stuff which is far more subdued in Heart. Heart is a lot more following. yknow. your heart. and prioritizing that over Mind/”rational” thought (alongside misc soul stuffs). Maid of Time for him is very tempting. I Would Like To See Grian Hit A Timeline With A Broom.

I don’t have much thought out for the other Hermits (mostly either an aspect or a class) but here’s some misc ideas: (note - the pair of class & aspect is v important because it dramatically changes how the god tier functions so basically any of these are subject to change)

Scar I’m thinking either Prince or Page? Not sure aspect. I’m leaning more towards Page but Scar with a destructive class sounds very fun. Also, bonus, both those god tier outfits are dorky as hell but I think he’d vibe with that.

Zedaph - Almost definitely an active class, unless we’re going the route of a classpect that opposes/challenges that. Aspect... hmm... Light? Maaybe Mind? I’m feeling a lean towards Light particularly with the s9 daredevil route.

Gem’s giving me Hope or Heart vibes? Not sure on class. I almost wanna say Rogue? But I’m always hesitant to have too many canon god tiers. Maybe Seer? Gem as a Seer sounds kinda fun.

Joe maybe Life? Maayyyybe Sylph...???

Cleo im thinking maybe Witch? Or maybe even Bard? with Witch they’d be an active class & have manipulation over their aspect which is fun, though the focus is use of aspect for benefit of self which i’m more ? on for them. Bard would be benefit of others and also a destructive class which is very fun for her. Not sure on Aspect though which would definitely change things up dramatically. Especially given the gorgon s9 theme I really wanna incorporate her statues stuff. Best I can think of for that would prob be Light/Void or Space?

Mumbo’s got me very stumped, but maybe Heir? For the transformative/”becoming” aspect thing. Sounds like it’d be something fun to mess with for him (espc given his s8 themes).

I feel like im legally required to make Wels a Knight.

Anyways enjoy this half-sensical babble.

[nautilusopus]

Serious non-troll: What if you like the cop-outs and the scrambled bullshit plots and the nonsense towers of half-constructed ideas? I agree that for example Nomura is a goddamn crazy person but I find his convulsions fascinating and want to see more of them.

i mean, you’re entirely within your rights to do that. it’s just frustrating that there’s visibly no effort put into any of it, and he’s just writing for the sake of what makes the trailer look good, and that’s been 100% to the detriment of the story ever since he’s started doing it

i’m not even inherently opposed to ridiculous convoluted bullshit. i’m one of those pretentious fuckheads that unironically likes End of Evangelion and thinks it made perfect sense, obviously, duh, with all its absolute nonsense of adam and lilith and rei being a god-analogue from absorbing both the white and black seeds and allowing shinji to dictate the ultimate outcome of third impact in the culmination of a couple of really fucking long and extremely obtuse character arcs. i mean, hell, i’m 38 chapters into a fic that is running off nothing but weird high-concept ideas of how reality and parallel universes work and abstract metaphor andsleep deprivation. in any other circumstances, i’m fine with convoluted batshit nonsense.

i think the best way to explain the heart of the issue is to look at what happened to the matrix trilogy. or actually wait this is tumblr, everyone’s in high school and would’ve been foetuses or something when Revolutions came out. homestuck, then. we’ll look at homestuck. 

okay so homestuck. remember when that was as big as it was? initially, the big stumbling block was the slow pace of act 1 where john just kind of fucks around throwing glass at clown dolls for a while and if you weren’t into that kind of humour that was where the comic immediately lost you, but what ultimately got the ball rolling was [S] WV: Ascend. the general metric back then was if you weren’t hooked by that one, you wouldn’t like homestuck at all, and for many people that was the point of no return. the reason WV: Ascend was as big of a deal as it was is that we’ve been seeing a bunch of disconnected nonsense happening all over the place, and this is the first time we see our first major time loop actually closed, with the promise of a few more being set up. all that supposed joke nonsense we’d been watching the whole time? it actually mattered, surprise! from there, the narrative spends a lot of time introducing a lot of new concepts – we have captchaloguing and paradox slime, and time travel, and doomed timelines, and exiles and future versions of planets from a parallel universe the metanarrative being perpetuated by the author being diagetic and fuck knows what other things i’m forgetting about. and then, to throw you for a loop twelve whole other characters show up on top of that. so then the narrative needs to spend time establishing who these people are and what their relevance to the story is – which it does, by having them be active participants in the first arc as things go on. this ultimately culminates in [S] Cascade, where we see all these different concepts eventually tie into one another because they were deliberately set up to, and it’s at that point that you figure, well shit we’ve hit a point where all the time travel stuff has finally come to a head. and with it, you’d expect it to also bring all the character stuff to a head too, but instead hussie has an entire extra act to go so we can’t have that resolve yet. 

so in the meantime, here are 20-ish whole other characters doing some other things. but we don’t have time to establish what’s effectively the silmarillion by now, so we have to speed past it, meaning we aren’t given a chance to care about these new people. but we can’t have a chance to care about them either, because we still have to tie all this into 5 whole previous acts that are meant to feed into this. at this point, homestuck is visibly collapsing under its own weight. character arcs are forced to fart around in circles because the status quo can’t change because we still need to make it to endgame with these character dynamics more or less intact. but that’s boring to read so we’ll do this entire “what if” thing and then retcon it all out of existence, and then have the fact that you can retcon things suddenly become vital to the resolution of the coming in place of anything we’ve already established previously – not the time travel, not the parallel universe with the trolls, not even the whole thing with the Scratch leading to the alpha kids being here in the first place – when the mechanic was only introduced in the first place to sloppily patch a story together that had long since devolved into infodumps that served to paint hussie further and further into a corner as he was forced to define his lore to get the plot to keep moving forward despite the fact that the narrative wasn’t focusing properly on the people that could make that happen anymore because the story had since switched focus from those people almost entirely. 

and in the meantime the damn thing got eaten up by filler, and suddenly characters from that filler are showing up like they were totally relevant to the main story the whole time even though literally nothing they did in their own subplot had any direct bearing on the story at large, unlike the initial 12 trolls. why yes, Alternate Universe Calliope was a completely necessary addition to the story! didn’t you see our important sidestory thing where they do Stuff, and then her showing up in the climax to resolve some other things that are sorta disconnected from the main plot anyway?

not to mention the shipping. nothing ruins a story faster than throwing in a love triangle or eight, and then immediately invalidating all the character growth that happened on top of that anyway by having it literally never happen. not that it would’ve mattered anyway, because remember, we never actually got to have any of this really developed to begin with. 

by the time we hit end of act 6, there’s been so many new concepts haphazardly stapled onto the story and so many threads brought up and discarded entirely when we already established back with [S] Cascade that the story works best when they actually do this and it is doable, that it stops being merely complicated and off the wall, and starts being spread too thin, incomprehensible, and ultimately no longer part of a whole narrative deliberately comprised of interlocking storylines. shit’s just kinda happening at you, and rather than getting to see parts of a text interacting as a result of them coming from somewhere for the express purpose of then going to somewhere, you’re just being asked to accept that, yup, that’s a thing that’s going on right now. neato. sure is some stuff happening and whatnot. and in the end, for all that posturing, it didn’t even do anything. in pre-cascade homestuck that wouldn’t have even been a full flash. a bunch of nonsense happens, and then They Fightan Good, and then it’s over and there’s not a single time paradox or meta-interaction to be found. none of the stuff they built up to over all these years mattered, and neither did any of the stuff they just threw in, either. 

i’m sure you see what i’m getting at with this. 

(also he treats the women in his stories like shit and quite frankly i’m sick of it and even more sick that people keep giving him a pass for it because it’s practically reached parody levels at this point , so there’s that)

i have no problem with convoluted twisty bullshit in and of itself. but it has to accomplish something aside from just existing, and nomura doesn’t do that. by his own admission, kingdom hearts wasn’t planned, and it shows really badly. characters and entire story mechanics and plot lines are introduced solely for the sake of introducing them. they don’t go anywhere or build to anything, because they can’t, because fuck we have to stall for kh3 shhhh just keep adding more soras and hopefully no one will notice. i think the last time any of this actually mattered was kh2, and even that had a lot of the issues i’ve mentioned here. as a result of all of this, the character arcs suffer a lot, and you’re left with nothing but a big ball of plot twists that goes nowhere, and a bunch of characters that only somewhat have anything to do with any of it. 

i don’t feel like it’s overly nitpicky to find this kinda gross and seriously insulting of the audience’s intelligence. it’s just lazy time-stalling. i get that people sometimes really don’t care about stuff like narrative and character development and are just here to see riku punching mike wazowski in the teeth or whatever, but i think it’s disingenuous to pretend that these aren’t nonetheless important parts of a game’s construction – especially a studio that used to openly pride itself on selling games with a focus on story. 

and the genuinely frustrating part is, no one cares. people are gushing all over everything square puts out because it’s square, so they know they don’t have to put effort into their stories. i’m well aware i’m in the minority for saying that these games are bad. but i also thought we were done with treating, “it’s just a video game, bro! why do you care so much about the story having quality as a narrative? this isn’t an english class!” as a valid rebuttal. 

maybe i should’ve used the matrix trilogy instead. most people hate movies 2 and 3 for the weird “YOU’VE ALREADY MADE THE CHOICE/EVERYTHING THAT HAS A BEGINNING HAS AN END NEO” shit and the bonkers christ-allegory ending. i hate it because neo is about as interesting as the rock that cracked goofy’s skull open.