Yes, agreed. Also, gaaaah, flip the stuff on Lalonde-VOID is obvious, THIEF is not. And heh-Dean would be cool-especially given James Dean.

Sincerity is not Dave's strongpoint, certainly. You hit some of what I was attempting to get at in far better words. I find it hilarious how much his troll and Exile have in common: a devotion to law. What is this actually saying about Dave? It's also kind of pointing that out of the trolls, the one most able to get what they needed/wanted out of their kids was Terezi. She made the doomed timeline Davesprite came from and used her foresight at a very pertinent moment-when Vriska was about to doom them all with her decision.

It's both sad and pathetic how self-destructive Vriska was-for all that she did, the person most damaged by her actions was her. She screwed herself out of any meaningful relationship, out of meeting alpha-John and ultimately, her own life. The one good purpose she served was to make Terezi face her chosen duty-justice. I believe that as well as doing it to preserve the lives of the surviving trolls, it was equally a merciful thing. Vriska's existence was a painful, sad thing-a slide downward without stop, dragging anyone within reach down with her.

I am going to make something of a bizarre prediction. Crows are symbols of death-which Dave did in fact die, if only to rise to God Tier-but he will die again-to save "Dean". His death will be heroic and therefore permanent. There is very little to support this-but I do think that he will make a heroic sacrifice.

Also, sort of joke theory: the scratch kids will never find out UU's name. Nor will we.

The only way I can imagine Dave die ironically is if he was stabbed by his own broken sword.

In a strange way, that would have also been a full circle back to the part where he accidentally stabbed the bird with "cheap piece o' shit".

7scimitarroll wrote:

I've been reading out of order, but I was under the impression that the whole episode with the Tumor already counted as that? I thought that neither Rose nor Dave knew that they'd find their quest beds, and as such had reconciled themselves to their deaths prior to the events of [S] Cascade.

Hmm, that's a good point.  It's true that the Green Sun mission was presented as a suicide mission, and Dave was getting his snark on pretty hard trying to convince Rose to let him go instead of her.  At the same time, it's one thing to go on a mission you're told is a suicide mission, and another thing to actually face death.  Alone and in the absence of a quest bed, Dave might have choked.  It's possible.  Either way, his new godhood raises the stakes.  Before he ascended, he knew he was mortal; no matter how much he played with his timetables, someday it was going to be alpha-Dave that bit the dust.  Now he can be immortal, if he wants to be.  All he has to do is stay out of situations that would make him heroic or infamous.  He doesn't have to face death anymore.  And I think this will make it more heroic if he finally decides to face death after all.

And after writing that, I watched the new update.  We've been trolled hard. 

And now... Andrew is a robot... who is taunting us.

This post contains massive spoilers, even more than usual.

Notable in the big splash picture with all the dead characters: Jane and WV each have a question mark next to the big red X.  WV may be hanging onto life as PM faces down Ultimate Jack Noir, and Jane might not have died in the random explosion.  Marked with question marks instead of X's are Spades Slick and Clover.  Clover was last seen escaping Doc Scratch's study in typically lucky fashion.  I had presumed Spades Slick dead after he shot Snowman, which destroyed the universe SS was standing in at the time, but what do I know?  Dad is crossed out, but the red X is marked out with green scribbles, I assume to indicate that Dad is dead in the red universe (the original kids') but alive in the green one (the new kids').  Sollux, characteristically, is half crossed out; his physical self recently got obliterated propelling the trolls' asteroid towards the Green Sun, but he's got a dream bubble fragment that's still chatting up Aradia.  And the bear on Andrew's wall has a little frowny face.

Still canonically alive according to the picture: all four original kids; all the new kids except Jane; Dad; Li'l Cal; Ultimate Jack Noir; Peregrine Mendicant; Aradia; Sollux (x1/2); Karkat; Kanaya; Terezi; Gamzee; Lord English; Ms. Paint. 

Confirmed dead: the entire Felt, including Snowman, except for Clover; the three cronies of Spades Slick; the three cronies of Ultimate Jack Noir; the Aimless Renegade and the Wayward Questant; Doc Scratch; Bro; Mom; Becquerel; Aradiabot; Tavros; Sollux (x1/2); Nepeta; Vriska; Equius; Eridan; Feferi; Bilious Slick; Maplehoof.

That makes eighteen and a half established characters definitely alive, versus twenty-two and a half definitely dead -- well, thirty-five and a half if you count the entire Felt and not just Snowman, but they totally should not count.  Hussie is indeed burning through his characters prodigiously!

So apparently, we've come across a GCAT in the storyline!

Once again, the "GCAT" motif :|a

On that note, I have a feeling we will know where Rose's cat ended up when he was mysteriously spirited away.

Also, this fan art... it made me glee with delight... The Sufferer as Akio is just sooooooo.... perfect. Both have suffered for the world, and presumably blames everything wrong with the way the world works: http://tubbsen.tumblr.com/tagged/utenastuck

And the Disciple would be his devoted Kanae.

Last edited by Hiraku (01-06-2012 10:18:41 PM)

Ro-Lal has a name! 

She is Roxy Lalonde, the Souse of Void. 

I made up the Souse part.

She seems a lot more competent at dark arcana than Rose was at the beginning of the game.  Maybe Rose would have gotten this good at it by the time she was fifteen and a half, like Roxy is.

How did I miss "roguishly?"  Yes, the Rogue of Void.  Sounds dangerous!

I wonder what a Rogue does, or a Void hero, for that matter.  Our existing examples are Nepeta (Rogue of Heart) and Equius (Heir of Void), respectively, and since those are the two least relevant trolls in the plot, we don't really have much of an example to work from, do we?  We do know that Void heroes are hard to spy on because of those perceptual dark spots.  I have no idea what a Rogue does.  Obviously not the same thing as a Thief.  Crawls through vents?  Has a land with a cute acronym?  Maintains the shipping wall?

I think this increases the probability that all the titles are gender-specific.  All seven of the duplicated titles, including the ones like "rogue" and "seer" that aren't gender-specific in normal English, have only gone to a pair of the same gender.  That narrows the ironist whose name I presume to be Dick Strider down to Mage, Bard, and Prince.

At last, the mystery of the final 2 kids are known!!!

I certainly don't mind! 

Hee   I kind of want to respond, but in the end, if you don't care about Homestuck, you don't care about Homestuck.  Convincing someone to care about something is a Herculean feat best reserved for things more important than webcomics.  Sorry it's not to your taste.

Aha, I see you've changed the last line of your previous post from "I haven't cared about Homestuck for a thousand pages" to "I don't like Homestuck."    But I kind of feel like the same reasoning applies.  I'm not going to convince you to like Homestuck -- especially not when your comments about Homestuck are perfectly sensible.  You're quite right about Homestuck's long chatlogs and digressive style; they are real, and though I think these narrative choices contribute a lot to the impact of the story, I can understand why they are not to everybody's taste.  This is not a case of I'm right and you're wrong; it's a case of I like Gorgonzola cheese and you don't like Gorgonzola cheese.  So why argue?

Hiraku wrote:

On that note though, I had no idea Hussie made new pages based on audience input.

Yeah, back before Homestuck started, Andrew ran an MS Paint Adventure called Problem Sleuth.  There was a forum called the Suggestion Box where fans would submit commands for the characters, and Andrew would choose a command and illustrate the results.  The conceit of the comic, at that time, was that fans decided the direction of the comic.  A lot of fans liked that system, and when Andrew stopped using the Suggestion Box shortly after starting Homestuck, people complained.

Why the change?  Well, MSPA picked up a lot of readers as things went on.  Speaking about Problem Sleuth, Hussie explained the change this way:

AH wrote:

When a story begins to get thousands of suggestions, paradoxically, it becomes much harder to call it truly "reader-driven". This is simply because there is so much available, the author can cherry-pick from what's there to suit whatever he might have in mind, whether he's deliberately planning ahead or not. But as it happened, I was planning ahead much more as the story neared its end, and I would tend to A) pick commands that suited what I had in mind, or B) just call a spade a spade and outright MAKE UP a command for an idea I had, which I did most often for many of the later attacks (like the Sleuth Diplomacy variations, Comb Raves, etc).

Of course, Andrew could have just used the first reader command to be submitted.  That's what he did with the very first MSPA, Jailbreak.  Jailbreak was not very good.  It had a couple funny jokes (including the "what pumpkin?" meme that survives to this day), but in the end it had no story -- and how could it, with the author unable to plan what the main character would do, and readers who were largely more interested in seeing their bizarre and madcap commands illustrated than in developing a narrative?  Andrew left Jailbreak unfinished.

So if you choose the first command, it's very hard to tell a good story; but if you can pick any command you want from a suggestion list of hundreds or thousands, you might as well just make it up yourself.  And indeed, that's what Andrew took to doing in Homestuck.  I think the last time the Suggestion Box was opened was to allow fans to choose the names of the trolls, and even there, Andrew was selective; the names had to have the right number of characters, evoke the appropriate zodiac sign, and so on.  The fan-driven comic format just wasn't compatible with good storytelling, so when Andrew decided he wanted to try telling good stories, he had to downplay and then abandon the format.

Last edited by satyreyes (01-18-2012 07:22:52 PM)