(From MS Paint Adventures: Homestuck. Click for full-sized nanowatch.)

I stopped reading Homestuck for the past two weeks while my computer was down. As my posting prowess in the interim should suffice to show, this was not a result of my inability to post, but rather an inability to couple my Homestuck-reading with another, related project. I still shouldn’t be posting; I have too much to do to wrap up the quarter at school.

In the interim, the post-Scratch session has gotten weeeeeird.

It’s become apparent that the effects of the Scratch, for whatever reason, are not limited to simply switching the places of the kids and guardians. Elements of the trolls’ universe are seeping in, and not just the “thirteenth troll”. There are the lusii on Jake’s island, and there’s Lalonde’s repeated references to “wiggling day” in her last conversation with Jake. And the two characters we haven’t gotten proper introductions to seem to have taken the lead; they seem to know a lot more about the session they’re entering than Jane and Jake, even though the latter two have gotten plenty of information from the “thirteenth troll”, to the point of dictating the order of entry.

It seems rather odd that Lalonde and Strider would know so much about the game that Jane and Jake don’t. Couple that with Lalonde’s aforementioned “wriggling day” reference, and it’s easy to wonder whether they’re entirely what they seem – which would make Lalonde’s suspicion of Betty Crocker’s nature rather suspect.

Oh yeah, and then there’s the part where Jane just freaking exploded.

I imagine that, when this happened, all sorts of questions ran through the fandom’s heads, questions like how the story could continue with the equivalent of John dead (after Jake’s death had been foreshadowed in Jane’s dreams). As we’ve heard, Jane has been the subject of assassination attempts before, so she could conceivably survive this one. But the impression I’ve gotten from the latest interlude is that this entire post-Scratch session may well have been a red herring, allowing Hussie to toy with the fans with various bits of “fan-canon”, only to serve as a long-winded introduction to “Hussiebot” and his schtick.

That schtick, if we are to take this panel at face value, may well involve every piece of misfortune that has befallen this story so far. If Hussiebot is, somehow, the invisible hand behind every major death in the story, truly Andrew Hussie’s “evil twin”, then perhaps he is the true villain of the story, more supreme even than Noir, Scratch, maybe even Lord English – if he doesn’t have some sort of tight-knit connection with English somehow.

I won’t be able to remark on whatever happens next with Hussiebot, John, and Jade until Sunday at the earliest, leaving open the possibility that there will be some sort of major development on Saturday that will be immediately followed up on and leave any reaction I might have in the dust. It’s not entirely out of the question that the universe we just spent nearly a month getting acquainted with will still have some impact on the story, but I do have to admit: it is refreshing to get back to the main plot again.

(From MS Paint Adventures: Homestuck. Click for full-sized uranium shortage.)

The post that went up on Monday night/Tuesday morning was actually pretty much done last Saturday. In the week since then, enough has happened, and enough questions have been raised, that I’m actually rather interested in this act, even if Hussie is likely to resolve quite a few of the mysteries raised in pretty short order, and even if his writing in this act hasn’t quite been up to snuff (even though the clunky writing is intentional, these kids seem even more alien than the trolls).

I’m interested in whether there’s any relationship between the post-Scratch Crockercorp, the pre-Scratch Betty Crocker, and (as seems very likely) the pre-Scratch Condesce. I’m interested in to what extent this universe is lighter than we’re used to, and to what extent it’s ultimately darker, and what its ultimate relationship is to the one we’re used to. I’m even a little interested in who’s targeting Jane and why. I’m certainly interested – and this is not quite so complimentary to Hussie – in just getting to the game, or at least back to the characters we’re already familiar with.

But perhaps most of all, I’m interested in the apparent confirmation and appearance of the long-rumored fan obsession, the “thirteenth troll”.

While ultimately rooted in the zodiac, and speculated on by fans even before our proper introduction to the trolls, the existence of a thirteenth troll became ultimately rather unlikely as time went on and we learned more about the trolls, and right now I’m not sure how it’s even possible. She claims that she herself played the game, but there’s no evidence that it is possible for there to be anything other than an even number of players, indicating that whoever she is, there’s another troll that she played with. That doesn’t even address the question of what session she comes from, or what it was like; it’s very unlikely it’s one that we’re familiar with. Somehow she knows how this session will go, yet claims to have “sync[ed] Up these conversations with yoU on the same day that i begin playing as well”, or in other words, she hasn’t even played herself yet. And then there’s her association with what appears to be an exile’s terminal at the start of the act…

Then there is what she says. She refers to “the legendary octet of mUtUal progenitoriety”, and refers to the titles of the kids we’re familiar with by name, indicating that this final session will consist of not only these four post-Scratch kids, but also the four kids who have already played the game to this point. And beyond that, she also foreshadows the ending of all of Homestuck, claiming that together they will “heal a great breach in paradox space”:

UU: and while the emerald eye of this storm is fixed in the abyss forever
UU: today yoU are poised to escape its scowl once and for all.
UU: by skaias gUiding light, yoU may leave behind its tUrning arms of bright coloUrs and mayhem, and secUre peace for yoUr cosmic progeny for all dUration.

In other words, while “uranianUmbra” is rather dense with the purple prose, the gist of what will happen is clear: this unified session will ultimately break the cycle of misfortune caused by the game and the enemy, and ensure that however many universes may follow, they won’t have to go through what everyone in Homestuck has gone through. It also suggests where she herself may come from: a future session, one after everything both groups of kids achieve in this one has made them legends in every subsequent universe. (Which in turn, suggests whatever everyone does, it won’t do away with the game entirely, and her remark about the “emerald eye” suggests the Green Sun won’t actually get destroyed either.)

I’m a bit surprised, not only that Hussie would include a thirteenth troll, but that he would allow her to drop, in her words, such “casual spoilers” about what is to come in this act. He let so much information slip here that it’s not even that hard to figure out what Act 7, Homestuck‘s epilogue, is likely to consist of. If I were a betting man, I’d bet that much about UU will remain a mystery throughout Act 6, and getting a proper introduction to her, however brief, will be the ultimate goal of Act 7.

(From MS Paint Adventures: Homestuck. Click for full-sized reign of the pool balls.)

So. Let’s talk about that EOA flash some more.

A single installment of a comic has to be absolutely incredible for me to devote two posts to talking about it. If anything would qualify, it would be that flash, but that’s not why I want to talk about it. Nor do I want to talk about it because of Hussie’s Halloween (sort of) surprise unveiling Lord English in full to us for the first time (after I noted his glaring absence in the EOA). Rather, I want to talk about it because arguably the most important development in that act-ending flash wasn’t conveyed clearly.

To be fair, without dialogue (and the lack of dialogue is an important part of the appeal of Homestuck‘s flashes), it may well have been impossible to convey clearly. Without dialogue, it’s impossible to tell whether Rose and Dave can’t find the Green Sun, or if it’s just obscured by the Tumor, the distance, and quite possibly being in the middle of Derse’s moon. Without dialogue, it’s impossible to tell whether that huge green orb is the Green Sun itself, or the shockwave from its destruction. It’s especially impossible to tell when Hussie intentionally structured the flash out of strict chronological order (even by Homestuck standards – for instance, that Red Miles attack of Noir’s, depicted immediately after he’s seen mourning Jade’s death and before he even places her on the Quest Bed, actually happens after everything else Noir does in that flash, aside from PM showing up), meaning Rose and Dave’s quest for the Sun was interspersed with Aradia and ghost-Sollux waiting for them outside the (existing) Sun.

I got a lot of things wrong in my initial post on the EOA, and I was okay with that. I intended that post to be my own first impressions and interpretations, largely unencumbered by what other people said about it and how other people interpreted it, and I didn’t want to bother re-editing it heavily after reading those other interpretations. In particular, my title said that I didn’t see why people were making a big deal out of Scratch’s “suckers” remark to Gamzee, and if I didn’t still think that after reading what I got wrong I would have changed the title. We already knew that Scratch’s entire MO consisted of manipulating people to serve his own ends. We already knew that Scratch was tricking Rose and others into unleashing an unstoppable universe-eating demon (an aspect of his motivation I don’t think he mentioned to anyone other than the reader and people he’d recruited to serve English directly). While we learned more about his ultimate plan, and that he committed more “lies of omission” than we had thought, I’m not sure we learned that much more about Scratch that we didn’t already know.

But the creation of the Green Sun is important to talk about, and while we can’t really do much more than speculate, we can talk a little bit about the implications, which should serve as a short prelude to the coming Act 6.

Rose’s mission to destroy the Green Sun was given to her by the horrorterrors, Lovecraftian abominations from beyond the Furthest Ring, and Doc Scratch provided her with the details to carry it out. According to their story, the Sun was the source of power for, among others, Jack Noir (and Scratch himself), and destroying it would also serve to avert their own deaths at the hands of some malevolent force. The horrorterrors gave Rose a map to plot a course through the knotted spacetime surrounding the Sun, to arrive at the Sun’s location at just the right time and place.

It now appears that the horrorterrors misled and tricked Rose and Dave into creating the Sun to serve whatever purposes they may have had, with Scratch as their accomplice. It’s anyone’s guess whether they’re actually under any kind of threat, or what their exact aims are, but it’s clear that they’ve screwed over two sessions and possibly many more, with their machinations leading fairly directly to the creation of Doc Scratch and Jack Noir’s omnipotence. Hussie calls all of act 5, and perhaps the entire comic, “the result of a very, very long con by Doc Scratch”; I might go even further. Everything that has completely screwed over the kids and trolls ultimately comes back to the deviousness of one grand enemy, one party that appears to have caused everything, of which Noir is ultimately a minor part. Whether anyone realizes the extent of their machinations remains in doubt.

It’s also clear that the kids and trolls can’t trust anyone, to any extent, except themselves and each other. Rose, with good reason, was very skeptical over whether to trust the horrorterrors, but even after the “grimdark incident” went ahead with the plan anyway, if only because there wasn’t much else to do with the Tumor. Now far from solving their myriad problems, she now bears some accidential responsibility for them, and what reason there may have been to trust that the horrorterrors have had their best interests in mind has gone out the window. Meanwhile, Doc Scratch has repeatedly said he never lies, and going back through his conversations shows that any lies he made about the nature of the Tumor, the Green Sun, and Rose’s mission were by omission, but one would have to parse his conversations very carefully to detect what he’s leaving out.

Everyone in a position to say more about the game world than any player would has proven to be utterly untrustworthy and working against them (though the two characters who inherited first-guardian power during the same flash may provide a sliver of hope). If the combined forces – soon all the surviving trolls will be joined with half the kids outside the Sun, seven in all – do realize the scope of the forces arrayed against them and start aiming to oppose them, they will effectively be flying blind, with their only source of information being the same forces they seek to oppose, which they will need to guess at when they need to do what they say, the opposite, or something else entirely.

This, then, is the central conflict of Act 6, the final substantial act: the efforts of the kids and trolls, working in complete concert for the first time, to oppose and take down their true enemy, which has started to show its face. It is far more difficult than anything the game has challenged them with to this point, with even beginning to effectively oppose them a seemingly impossible task, but one they are faced with nonetheless; only time will tell if they will succeed in accomplishing their goal, or their enemy’s. To the side, PM and perhaps eventually Jade will oppose Jack Noir, but only on the side; though the Noir ruse may prove a critical distaction, and even prevent any potential victory from proving empty, if not complete it, it is no longer the comic’s most important conflict.

But perhaps there’s an even larger story here. In one sense, the creation of the Sun completes the biggest time loop of all, with the crisis faced by the kids leading to the creation of the power behind that crisis, with Doc Scratch engineering the source of his own power. But in an even bigger sense, the Green Sun is the source of one of the most central aspects of the game itself. Perhaps, just perhaps, the greatest time loop of all hasn’t been completed yet, and will only come to fruition with the creation of the game itself.

I may be back later with thoughts on the start of Act 6.