/hot/ - Hussverse On-Topic

"Also, this reminds me of Hu¢¢ie's tard式神 manifesto against presumably, Maddox, and the deep evil unfunniness of pirates, and ninjas, and calling things gay.
Just realized that Dave is a ninja and Vriska and Eridan are pirates solely for this reason."

>>241
Also, while writhing in insomnia, (I think I've said this before) I had the broad idea that I think that Hu¢¢ie was making fun of the prevalence of mutants in the Marvel Universe because of X-Men by making virtually every troll a mutant and basing most of them (especially the earlier ones) on X-Men but I think, meta jokes, especially the ones in Homestuck, are basically jokes that are half-finished.

Like, I can't believe I'm saying this but you really needed someone like John to lampshade it by directly pointing it out in a silly way or you get no catharsis from recognizing it; it's not humor, it's just a fucking thing. Usually I would say that's "lowbrow" humor but it doesn't go far enough to be satirical so yes, it's just unfinished lowbrow humor. Make an actual joke instead of making a vaguely amusing parallel and making it SUPER SECRET, you fucking hackfraud.

Hu¢¢ie if human.

https://youtube.com/shorts/QOmw4D1svRA?si=eBMEpgqApyj2Oo3j

>>242
>woah, so you guys are like… the x-men! you guys are exactly like the x-men!
>WHAT. NO. WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT.

would it have been kino?

I feel like people would be way more interested in this concept if you gave it a simpler name, like a deconstruction of Homestuck and where it could have gone before Hu¢¢ie crashed out.

It just gets flak because most people on the internet are just here to fuck around and socialize, rather than decipher all of that.

>>244
No, it's not like that. That seems intentionally poorly written.

It's more like (I'm not the best at this so give me a breal);
theres one guy thats super strong and multiple of you guys are psychic and even terezi can like lick her screen is that a mutation?
NO.
I MEAN, PROBABLY NOT, I NEVER CARED TO FUCKING ASK. THAT'S KIND OF A SHITTY QUESTION. NOT EXACTLY A GOOD ICEBREAKER AND AS AN INLET TO ANY ACTUAL CONVERSATION, SHE'D JUST USE TO GO FULL-FORCE INTO HER USUAL WEIRD SHIT
SO FUCK OFF. WHAT'S YOUR POINT?
i just have to wonder like you know how mutations work right?
what the hell is the cancer rate in your society? can your health care even cover all that?
whatever its just like xmen at this point theres so many mutants that not being a mutant is weird and you start to wonder why magneto hasnt just won yet due to sheer numbers
which i guess applies to you guys too
OUR GOVERNMENT USES GIANT ROBOTS TO CULL US.
yeah thats xmen too
but im still not buying it
ARE YOU SAYING MY SPECIES' ACTUAL REALITY IS BULLSHIT?
basically
yea

>>245
What concept?

>>247
Final proof you don't need the tags every line break.

>>250
I'll kill you.

>>251
Adjusted the formatting 4u

>>223
For a Virgo, Hu¢¢ie doesn't actually have (or display, let's say) much respect for anything.

>>253
"Like all good comedians."

>>248
The first two-thirds of this thread. The heuristics guy.

>>255
>The heuristics guy.
"Hermeneutics."

The point is to differentiate it from other things in the fandom. There are a lot of "deconstructions of Homestuck" that are myopic, self-indulgent pieces of shit that don't contextualize anything and jerk the comic off to the stars.

"Hermenutics" implies we're taking a good look at the author to try and understand the direction the comic took at each stage. Which most things revolving Homestuck just fucking don't because they assume Hu¢¢ie has some master thesis he's working towards- which is, of course, dumb because the comic was strongly BIZNASTY in the interplay between the fandom and the creator. Originally, it was through direct inputs and eventually it devolved into the pretentious cat-and-mouse game of pandering, subversion, and encryption to irritate or sate every disparate part of the fandom in alternating phases.

I've called it a "deconstruction" and "reconstruction" in this very thread. I just think people underestimate how many cooks there were in the broth with Homestuck and assume Hu¢¢ie was an infinite well of ideas (no matter how bad they may have been) and divine inspiration.

Also, personally, I just think calling something something "Homestuck Hermenutics" is funny because it asserts a level of prestige to Homestuck which, evidently, it doesn't fucking have- despite some of the fandom's protests. I hate basically 80% of this fucking thing and genuinely believe it to be something of objectively zero artistic merit at the end of the day.

Also, Homestuck sucks because Bro (especially), Dave, or Dirk never throw their sunglasses like shurikens like Wesker.

What the FUCK was Hu¢¢ie's problem?

What the fuck was up with god tiers representing maturity and the end of the coming-of-age story while simultaneously being extremely childish (colorful pajamas, the "kiddie camper handysash", etc)

>>258
In a way that slims the jargon down a bit, the synthesis of the ideal self (dreaming) and the actual self (waking) would be some kind of (Jungian) archetypal hero; this is basically just a hyperbolic version of what kids do with their existing personas though immaturely grandiose- this is part of why SBurb is meant to evil.

It should be noted that the most powerful class in the game is given to the most immature character who is literally developmentally and physically/sexually retarded. If Caliborn was human, he'd be a Downie whose brain couldn't past that of an eleven year old's and then he'd turn into a roid monster and start punching and shooting lasers everywhere.

>>259
(I tried to look up another mental impairment associated more with anger issues- because I remember there being one like that- because Down's syndrome is correlated with very high agreeability which doesn't fit Caliborn at all but whatever, everyone gets the point when you just say "Downie"…)

>>259
I doubt sburb is meant to be evil, it's just horrifically incompetent for some reason (the reason is Hu¢¢ie's incompetence)

Made the mistake of opening reddit
*inhales*
CALIBORN'S ENTIRE FUCKING THING IS THAT HE HYPERFOCUSES ON THE WRONG THINGS YOU FUCKING RETARD

Also "over a century or more" is fucking nothing to an immortal Lord Of Time.

>>261
>I doubt sburb is meant to be evil,
Here I would use "was." And I think it'd be a significantly better story if it "was evil." You're free to disagree with that but I have a lot of reasons and a lot of ideas about the (potential) story that connect to that.
>>262
A big part of SBurb is that it supports brute force over guile which is why Caliborn just coincidentally (as coincidental as predestination can be) enters into Godhood through sheer will to power. This is part of why SBurb is a shit because the one guy who gets the mandate to become God is a tepid excuse for a villain that goes "HNRRGGGHHHH ME HORNY, KILL MY FUCKING SISTER" like that's the only part of the prophecy about his defeat. It's also a key reason why Act 6 is shit.

Your villain is a moronic force of nature and yet nobody even outwits him, they just do exactly what he knows is going to happen.

I'm honestly surprised that Homestuck never capitalized on a Sburb-themed chess set.
Then again, I suppose it wouldn't be fun if the second player is destined to win without exception.

>>265
>Then again, I suppose it wouldn't be fun if the second player is destined to win without exception.
You don't need to play by that rule, silly.

One day, I want to go through "Homestuck Forgotten Facts" and rip it a new asshole. Maybe that should be alongside the piece-by-piece reread though.

Never realized how much Hu¢¢ie used the word 'cagey' in Homestuck. Wonder why.

>>282
He seems fairly private. Probably a word that comes up often with him.
Not that I can't relate

>>282
His vocabulary is incredibly limited unless he's reading straight from his thesaurus (which he definitely does NOT do even though a solid 30% of Homestuck's humor is predicated on big words, and/or awkwardly extensive, and/or antiquated way of saying things. You VVILL believe him.)

>>285
Has anyone compiled the most used words in Homestuck? I keep finding the 'word count' and 'amount of words that [insert character here] has said'.

>>286
I think it's "ass" by far (mostly because of compound words like big-ass and whatnot). I also think Dave and Karkat (the two biggest talkers) use "ass" the most, even despite Karkat being known as FUCKMAN.

ZOG made her into a gross lesbian, through some mechanism I don't fully understand.

—-

The classpect system doesn't work for anything beyond Homestuck since it was designed around specific creative-seeming combinations like Bard of Rage and Heir of Void. Fanworks don't have many combinations to choose from that are substantially different from what already exists.

>>289
>The classpect system doesn't work for anything
Full stop.

>>293
/hot/ is slow enough already, and every post on /ysg/ is a precious jewel to me. They can stay

Woops, they're all in Hell.

>>157
Again, I guess this is the part where I admit that 2perg was "right" or rather that I got off on the wrong foot. (I remembered because I was rereading my book on the train.) I wanted to apply structuralism to Homestuck to show how it fails at creating its own "structure" and by inductive reasoning, every framework for classes and aspects are logically incoherent; bullshit.. Let me actually attempt to do that now since all I said before was that was what I wanted to do.

To put it into simple terms, a large part of structuralism is things being defined by their opposite. The fact that there are not especially clear opposites in Homestuck already makes it a failure, there is a lot of overlap in Homestuck and while there is some consensus on the opposites with aspects (though there are still some outlier theories and again, a lot of overlap), nobody can agree on class dynamics (even though there are some clear pairs, they are not "opposites"- Thief and Rogue are a clear pair but they both still steal and there is no class that is said to "purely give".) "Passive" and "active" are terms whose exact definitions depend on the exact relation we're describing. Internal consistency goes out the window.

Furthermore, to reference the image, Homestuck's classes and aspects are not "transformative." Every model of a circular, transformative model of Homestuck's aspects is an even bigger clusterfuck (ever notice how the fandom cares far more about aspects than titles? It's because they're more abstract, there's more intellectual wiggle room while classes are titles which are supposedly intuitive but ultimately just as arbitrary) that jumps through inconsistent levels of abstraction and often has no rhyme or reason to the procession of its opposites (with some being directly related to each other through transformation while others are further away; the one exception where this would make sense is Time and Space but that's never the case.)

Finally, and most ironically, the system is not self-regulating because the Aspects are implied to be fundamental elements of reality as opposed to the (softly, not fully) subjectivist model of structuralism. The Aspects do not exist to self-regulate the game; they are metaphysical. (Then again, so is the game- whether all universes in Homestuck are created by the game is rather ambiguous- but the comic goes out of its to further Reify the Aspects into physical reality through Lord English's cracks in space.)

This is all an attempt to disprove any and every classpect theory. I chose structuralism because it was the most abstract, base model for well, "structures", possible. This makes it especially apt for Homestuck. All we needed was clear and intellectually consistent connectivity (pure, actual opposites- say if, Knight was someone who protected their Aspect and Heir was someone who is protected by their Aspect, but this is universally acknowledged as not their actual opposites. Let me chime in and say that the other pair in a hypothetical Homestuck would be "Witch" and "Maid"- one who attempts to undermine their Aspect and one who reinforces their Aspect.) and then we would work from there on the coherence. But we don't have that. We have a fundamentally broken and lazy system.

This is applying an intellectual framework to a story to explore how it doesn't work within it- and by extension, inductively why no system would work to "structure" it. I don't see why it's so wrong to then inverse it to try and make it fit. I've mentioned this before, this is just me actually proving it with a specific excerpt from my book.


>>296
*do it

>>296
Also, I guess this is to say that the depth of the critique of the comic with these concepts isn't so deep. It's just that the sheer scope of how I'd change the comic BIZNASTY off these ideas is. It's quite simple, really.

>>296
>Knight was someone who protected their Aspect
It's not?!?

>>296
>the other pair in a hypothetical Homestuck would be "Witch" and "Maid"
Missing the Miko! Unless we'd make that shrine(maid)en

>>301
"It is" very vaguely but I'm saying it would still be this in a theoretical new system where "Heir" is seen as its counterpart (it's not, neither really have clear ones; we can go over the examples of the pairs that people agree upon)
>>302
I wouldn't use those names. I think I've said in this thread that I'd completely use stock fantasy class names instead to make things more readable.

>>303

No Witches or Maids? Those are classic paydirt!

>>304
The idea (very recently revised) was to have the classpects as thus:
Paladin of Nike, Priestess for Apollo, Warrior from Leucothea, and Seer to Aeolus.

I'm trying to figure out the best synonym and preposition for GREEN to make both her rebelliousness and her precognition immediately clear or at least not have implied contradiction.

>>305
I was trying to make something happen with prepositions there too but I'd probably have to read more to make them meaningful.

Those are their new Denizens and what's actually important is the element they represent which is universal for all sessions despite using different pantheons (is how I'd do it.)

>>305
>>306
In fact, I might swap them around.

>>305
>>307
Mostly because "from" and "to" should be reserved for a pair of opposites but I can't think of another proper dichotomy for prepositions.

>>305
>>306
>>307
>>308
I guess "of" and "for" works because "for" implies they don't originate from the object and imply a sort of different cardinal momentum.

So it goes like this now:

Paladin to Nike. Priestess of Apollo. Warrior for Leucothea, and Seer from Aeolus.

Hope you enjoyed that mindless self-indulgence.

It should be noted that none of the Kids' grist types associate with their elements. You just get a ton of elongated hexagonal bipyramids, cubes, tears, and diamonds.

My system would have the polygons associated with the elements of the characters be their shapes of their grist (both for building and from battling- build grist should not exist; I'd restructure the game so that everyone needs to enter and be invaded in order to help the first player in the chain progress) with the exception of GREEN who gets the shape of aether which is her associated object.

None of this is relevant or internally consistent in Homestuck proper.

I can't sleep.

What's your opinion on the assesment held by some people that Homestuck is shy of experiencing a cultural revival, not unlike the Star Wars prequels? Is there some probable truth to the claim, or is it just wishful thinking coming from a bunch of Stockholm syndrome patients?

>>314
Kinda. I felt it bubbling for about a year or two now, especially as worked on some of the HS themes and banners.
It's highly (and arguably intentionally/spitefully) imperfect, but a "formative work", and you can't be ashamed of that type of thing forever.

But to that blogpost, I don't think Homestuck or even the superior Umineko will ever do "Spiderverse" numbers, because you have to read

>>314
>>314
It will see some fandom success with aoomers and zoomers (as it is already doing) but none of this will amount to any broader culture movement or anyone making of their own that's of note.

That is to say that it doesn't really matter.

A quick summation for an even further reaching conclusion that I've never made expressly apparent:

Alchemy is often understood to be the search for immortality or a perfect transfusion of any item into gold. It was much more metaphysical; it was an attempt to understand the cosmos through earthly materials. Jung took this further and said that it was a form of self-actualization through synchronicity (hence the connection to zodiacs.)

The conclusion that I'm going to assert here is that maybe the cool alchemy stuff and the time travel shouldn't have been in the same comic. I'm saying this partially because of how hard I find them to synthesize personally while still being meaningful in an Aristotelian sense but also because the comic was shit.

That is to say that Homestuck was kind of ill-founded since day one and it was never going to be very good. It certainly was never going to be something "intellectual."

>>317
Oh, yeah, and don't even try to get me on trying to also integrate Hu¢¢ie's half-baked data structurisms alongside those two things, holy shit, lmao.

Hello Aranea-Anon, it is I, that guy from /co/. I have a question for you.
Got a voice headcannon for Aranea?

>>179
>rather it is more about what is ego-adjacent and what is a self-defense mechanism against a perceived incongruity with the ego.
Let me correct myself from the past here very hard here
*Ego Syntonic
and
*Ego Dystonic

These aren't me just finding the different words for things. These are different concepts. Ultimately, both are defense mechanisms though one is closer to the ego and the other is closer to reconciling reality with the ego. This is an incredibly important distinction and is far more meaningful than again, classifying actions as relatively rational or egocentric because again, they're both egocentric- one is just healthier and less focused on rationalizing the external world and more focused on rationalizing the ego.

Pontificate on this kind of shit.
Though I think this one was made as a joke.

>>392
I change it monthly now, but you can pick ol reliable yotsubaB in the options. Since July's won't be any less CSS maximalist

>>392
And GREEN was born doomed, sorry. Rose imageboard

>>392
/co//v/id talking point. Hu¢¢ie clearly had it out for at least like 40% of the cast by Act 6.
>>394
Also, this, she was never really a concern of his. I think he spat way more on Karkat, Terezi, and Rose, etc and for way less valid reasons. A big part of why GREEN is a useless jobber is because Hu¢¢ie has no idea how to write powerscaling. Gamzee becoming a murder hobo and Feferi dying for no reason were things done basically just out of spite and spite alone.

>>398
>/co//v/id talking point
My bad

>>133
Why the fixation on religion? Is this a predisposed interest or do you only care about how Homestuck utilized those themes? Talking in the context of your "rewrite".

>>406
>Is this a predisposed interest
Yes, I say as much in this thread, I think. I am a religious studies minor.
>do you only care about how Homestuck utilized those themes
Moreover, I will also repeat that "given its premise, its not really a stretch." The best way, in my head, would be direct and obvious references to specific mythos and a vague hero's journey parallel (which I would use as a sort of meta way to gripe about perennialism but I digress.)

There are things in the comic proper which I don't consider good religious symbolism, it's just pretty unarguably there. Some of the more obscurant shit can be argued but it runs into "It has literally no other reason to exist other than that". For example, specific things like Dave's dreamself and waking self both being awake at the same time is a fairly obscure alchemical reference. Part of why I know that was "it" was because the fans were really invested in the alchemy shit at the time and talked up a storm about it on the forums- I unfortunately have no evidence for this. I wonder why Hu¢¢ie nuked the forums with no given reasoning or forewarning.

It's also a fixation of the fandom and much of what I say either minimizes or debunks overarching religious interpretations.

It should be noted that we went into the comic with a turntechGodhead doing the time travel Holy Trinity PI thing being vaguely layed out. Nothing about ninjas or paradox clones or the giant skeleton's rainbow robe being vored by his conjoined ghost sister. Just that, "something something creation mythos", and The Sims * an adventure game, basically. Even alchemicalisms, Homestuck's most interesting part, were an emergent property.

To surmise, I don't put much stock in Homestuck's religious allusions as they are (they come and go), and I think my version would stay away from time travel for the most part and world religions (again, only mythos)

Also, only vaguely related to all this is that Hu¢¢ie should have realized he seriously SMURFED up when he made his time travel comic into a doomsday comic as well and he could still only barely rationalize it by the end of the comic.
>What happens if GREEN and Dave went back after John started the game and shrunk the meteors?
We don't really know. It's a pile of shit.

Also, something I find conspicuous despite "Platonic ideal this, Platonic ideal that" and Hu¢¢ie's "very, very good vocabulary, he would never, ever use a thesaurus" is his lack of use of the word "eidolon" despite it arguably being more apt, less wordy, and it showing a broader understanding of Platonic thought. In particular, you would think the section with acausal slime ghosts would bear mentioning eidolons, especially considering that they have an associated item.

You would also think that the trolls' associated items would have some relevance (or just, exist) but we only ever get to see Aradia's(I think?) This would at least be another way to make the ANCESTRAL CHUCKLEVOODOO retcon less obnoxious.

But the main point here is, again, that the intellectual backdrop that Hu¢¢ie has dDIAPd over the comic is pretty incongruous and he doesn't know what the SMURF he's talking about.

(I could get into the stupidity of the first quote in-depth but I won't. I'd like to call out the specific gaps in-between the commentaries so it becomes evident that Hu¢¢ie's weird love affair with "Something something Plato" is a very long-standing thing that probably crescendoed in Act 5. Not proof-reading. I just need to get this off my neck.)

I guess there is some truth that Platonic realism and Jungian archetypes can go hand-in-hand but they need some, like, actual reading (writing) to do. Now synchronicity seems to be the primary focus in Hu¢¢ie's eyes when the real glue that'd bind them is that Jung's archetypes are viewed as immanent, real things. This sort of reading starts to weaken with Dave's proper introduction and is basically rendered completely null with GREEN's proper introduction. As far as I'm concerned, we are still too far on the Platonic realism side of things. We get the idea that these things are “eidos” but only through casualty. Any idea of these items or ideas being “psychic structures” is loose and undermined by the sheer variety of characters- we only have a few items to work with but Lil' Cal is just kind of Lil' Cal.

Any attempt at psychoanalytic meanings ascribed to meanings is bunk because of how irrelevant Dream Selves (the most psychological part of Homestuck's mythos) are in the grand scheme of things. Yes, John dreamed up jesters and then jester became a bad thing. But they were also already a bad thing due to LE ANCESTRAL CHUCKLEVOODOOS in the end. Not everything is a clean loop. What about Dirk having to get rid of his Lil' Cal? What are we supposed to make of that besides that Jujus are “real ideas” and just kind of throw the Jung angle out the window. Nothing about Lil' Cal is connected by ideas; it's just that ideas kind of persist on their own through casualty. People are sort of inexplicably attracted to Lil' Cal with no significance to their relationship (again, it's all just “real”, physical) and it's a persistent image due to acausal logic alone. So this is why we get the atomism monologue. We had some psychological leanings in the early parts of the comic but they all get undermined by a rough approximation of “Platonic idealism” (which is less Platonic realism and more memetic recursion)- which I'm sure, ultimately, is meant to be a symbolic “compulsion to the plot” that Caliborn/Lord English is forcing upon everyone. This is not interesting but it is what it is. Huss had two intellectual frameworks that could have worked well together but his fixation on general synchronicity made it so that everything was too “real” (TIME LOOP, TIME LOOP, TIME LOOP) to have any psychological angle and so anything Jung-related or even just psychological is ultimately just lip service (though almost everyone wouldn't even say that.)

Moreover, it should be obvious that thinking about the character's psychology is far more difficult than writing a stable time loop in a comic where it's mostly just talking and all action is largely irrelevant unless it's specifically to set up a very isolated, mostly inconsequential pay-off which largely takes the form of items being put through time loops. The grist types don't really have properties of their own, there is no “idea”, same thing with the Jujus or any timelooped item- their significance is to no one in particular, to no perspective at all. They are not abstractions with fundamental qualities that can be observed (recollected), they are just things that independently (acausally) exist. Their qualities are as irrelevant as they could possibly be for physical items (nothing oil makes is fundamentally oil-ly, representative of oil, or say, HOT and WET and Lil' Cal has a variety of forms and they are perceived differently by different people at different times and stages.) Could we say that the perception of change is them learning the true Form (of just one example?)

Yes and no. Lil' Cal is not truly atemporal because his existence is a paradox while Lord English technically does define time and space through TEH ALPHA TIMELINE. Lil' Cal is also still not directly Doc Scratch/Lord English- he needs to be fused with a stupid SMURFING cueball for that. The cueball does not go through as much timeSMURFERy as Lil' Cal does and there is more than one of them, for whatever reason (even though you'd assume it'd be a Juju. This part can be retconned or assumed if you want to be a massive dumb 8ITCH about it.) We definitely could have had some metaphysical masturbation about it being a perfect sphere or whatever but we didn't get that. Also, again, there are two Lil' Cals and the second is deemed a fraud which kind of goes against the idea of a Form because it would be as true of a representation as the one that got fused with a cueball because only his substance (his clothes) changed (and hurr durr, didn't have the souls inside it but that shouldn't require it to be destroyed. You can say this is Caliborn being fallacious but mostly, I think this is Hu¢¢ie trying to cover his own ass when it comes to Lil' Cal and Jujus so that vaguely they become ever so closer to an idea of Forms.) This is really dumb. This isn't Platonic Realism (vaguely, Homestuck is closer to the idea of “hyperreality” if we are to assume that SKAIA and SBurb are some artificial, invasive constructs whose mechanisms allow for Lord English which is stupid for a couple of reasons but whatever. All of the Platonic realism shit- though more accurately dubbed broad essentialism and logical acausality- with the synchornicity, paradoxes, and the great Form narrative about the cherubs all work to bolster Lord English, this is inarguable, and all of them also serve to oppressively shackle to what is essentially an infinite traditional hero narrative. This isn't a deep or even remotely original read but it's all the Platonic talk ultimately amounts to- fight the narrative, reject idealism, embrace some nebulous form of self-acceptance. The question then is… why? I'm of the opinion that Hu¢¢ie gave up, rather than never having any better idea of what to do with this philosophical bulwark because right now, though “evident”, it amounts to essentially nothing that couldn't have been achieved without the namedrop.), but there is a vague, half-assed attempt to try and reincorporate some ideas about it in a story where none of the pieces quite fit anymore.

There was never really “a fork in the road between Jung and Plato.” There was more a fork in the road in writing the comic properly and not. Psychobabble was but an option that was squandered along with all the other ones. The final nails in the coffin are that classpects could have easily been attempts at representing Jung's archetypes, (I don't need to go over this shitshow again), there was some last-minute attempt to conform to the Hero's Journey, and there still being some persistent conspicuous echoes of Plato (timaeusTestified; it's unclear if he gave a shit about anything beyond the allegory of the sun) in the comic. I regret not thinking things through clearly before; of course Jungian and Platonic shit could work together. A lot. Now is it easy to represent Plato's theories of Forms through (Jungian) alchemy and time travel? No, not at all. (Now try and make that extended allegory into something about growing up and self-actualization.) It makes the time travel an easy trap, however, instead of mostly just being an inexplicable (self-indulgent) desire based on a gag from a previous adventure. I think one of Hu¢¢ie's most baffling writing decisions is ultimately based in Parmenides's criticism of independence in Platonic realism- the “Platonic ideal” of one character is like that of another, so there must be a third one (infinitely) and this, I think, is the origin of the Ultimate Self.


More on “Platonic ideals”, Hu¢¢ie has taken it to mean the iterative (though in actuality, mostly just redundant) way in which he writes characters. Forms (which should be an exact synonym to “Platonic ideal” and it's not clear why Hu¢¢ie would use the latter) would be never come to be or pass away, be unchanging, complete, and perfect. Ultimately, we're supposed to see Calliope and Caliborn as the Forms of the cast in its entirety which is 1) Frankly a baffling and pointless way to attempt to include Platonic realism into writing 2) Unnecessarily meta (no way?!) 3) Not true to Forms since they are comprised of contrary parts and they are intelligible to worldy knowledge (though alien.) Given Plato's conceits that a Form can be like a day where it can be at many places at once (while still being "not apart" from itself) and that it is only in “partaking in a Form” that other Forms resemble a Form (though that Form does not resemble them; One-over-Many), you would think the logical way to write the story would be characters attempting to fulfill a role or pursue a goal (again, classpects) based on ideals beyond human comprehension but this is barely relevant (though this might be the rationale behind the elevated motif of “the theater” in Caliborn's masterpiece and the exact direction of the Epilogues.)

All of this stuff regarding “persona alchemy” should reek of insecurity for a number of reasons. For one, it's an easy way to deflect evident gaps in his character writing and cast diversity. Secondly, Hu¢¢ie conspicuously avoids naming or playing with narrative (not even Jungian) archetypes (directly in the comic but mostly) in his rationale beyond “uuuuh, chaotic clown” and “Internet personalities.” Surely, this would be a useful metanarrative lens to write with if every character was iterative and deliberately seeking some impossible ideal? Instead, he goes broader and says “Platonic ideal of X” or lower that they're some splinter of himself. Hu¢¢ie has bristled at categorizations of his characters before, most notably when he defensively deflected comments about Vriska being a “Parody Sue” despite not having a compelling case for why she wasn't applicable and went on a mini-rant on TV Tropes for obsessively classifying things as tropes (even when his own comic ended up obsessively classifying its characters.) It should be obvious to anyone with half a brain that Hu¢¢ie is simply uncomfortable with his characters being classified as anything other than something he deems derivative of himself (which is, of course, wholly original) or ontologically self-evident (oh, the irony.) It's this insecurity that, at least partially, drove him to avoid an easy avenue to exploring the themes he attests the comic to having and ultimately forcing his hand into making the comic increasingly meta so that the characters that didn't seem to fit this theme all fell into the category of being forced into Caliborn/Lord English's narrative. Yes, yes, this was all about subverting the grand narrative all along, I was beginning to think there wasn't a point because there wasn't an intent I could pin down but all of the arbitrary things were intentionally arbitrary and all of the characters succeeded in not falling in line by accomplishing nothing. Not much of the story being able to be classified into arcs and the characters by roles is simply part of the package of being too afraid to even write vignettes where people come to reassess what they want to be (with the exception of Dave, oh-so-shockingly.) They all just fail and quietly accept that.

>>466
To be honest, Plato’s Parmenides is quite dense and confusing, and I don't really understand it (what contradictions we are meant to resolve if we're meant to see any at all. Moreover, how these ideas logically bridge into the rest of Plato's work. ) or what conclusion is supposed to be drawn from it other than the limits of epistemology. I don't think Hu¢¢ie understood it either, if he even directly read it or about it, (His omission of words like eidos and eidolon, his usage of the term of “Platonic ideal” instead of ever directly naming “Platonic realism”, and the quote where he outright misuses “Platonic ideal”) because while the comic is drenched with Platonic flourishes (I'm not sure if people remembering their past selves is a Platonic thing or just “It's easy to write” something something synchronicity), the most we ever get is THE APPLE MONOLOGUE, “be the hero” metanarrative bullshit with Vriska, and the general metanarrative arc we have to sort of squint our eyes to see with all the characters culminating in the cherubs which all, again, suck in both theory and execution. It's debatable if characters retaining traits cross-timeline or the specifics of Void are Platonic in their origin or not. It's hard to tell and it almost doesn't matter. It certainly doesn't add anything of significance to the “mind” of the work if so.

I don't think I'm really qualified to brainstorm a way to make this incredibly heady conceit (which I attest Hu¢¢ie to having, if only vaguely and sporadically) work. I came up with an idea but it's immediately flawed so I'd rather not get into it.

I've gone from the conclusion that Homestuck's vision was impossible (especially when incorporating time travel) to thinking that Homestuck's vision would just be really, really hard to make if it stuck to its most early heady ideas. This is technically a loss for Hu¢¢ie both in the sense that he could have laser-focused in on something meaningful in-between instead of faffing about with the most abstract and difficult concepts to represent (while also ignoring them half the time) and the fact that what he was “aiming for” at some arbitrary point around Act 2 was technically possible, if extremely difficult. I think SMURFING up because you didn't think things through and mashed together ideas that were sort of mutually exclusive is a lot better than SMURFING up and having a framework that would be, invariably, incredibly hard to convey to the audience on a fundamental level. The first is an impulsive thing, the second is sheer laziness or arrogance, take your pick.

I don't even think Hu¢¢ie failed in the best possible way of half-assing Platonic realism; for instance, if Homestuck were marginally more meta and Lord English's timeline was the only one that existed, period, that would make for a better comic in terms of internal coherence but alternate timelines were introduced the second time travel was and everything was SMURFED from there.

And, really, let's ground it for a second, the whole “Platonic realism” thing didn't have to be metaphysical (in the comic) to be relevant; the comic could have easily been about the Kids trying to minimax the game in order to create the “perfect world” before it becoming obvious that they were already living in it, essentially (this was already my proposed ending before I revisited Platonic realism. Hu¢¢ie does address this directly and this is THEORETICALLY a big part of the comic as is but actually read through on a character-by-character basis- take note of how often the game fluctuates from wanting to challenge the player or not, breaking an expectation or not- without Vriska mindpoison affecting everything and see how applicable it all really is. A huge problem is that Hu¢¢ie is using “ideal” far too literally with his talk of expectation and deviation. The problem is that Forms are intuitive but ultimately inscrutable to the human mind and not some constraint forced upon anyone. Now Hu¢¢ie may say “That may very well be true but what if it's a Platonic framework forced upon a reality that doesn't conform to it” and then I'd say “Boy, your comic sure doesn't address that, and what's the point of using a metaphysical framework when you have to ignore one of its core and completely unambiguous tenets to make some generic statement about idealization and growing up?” The scenario I wrote out is that any attempt to embrace an ideal is essentially equally valid while Hu¢¢ie is more intent on actively failing at achieving something you are perfectly cognizant of because it creates individuality. The former requires some focus on what “ideal”- such to where it's, ironically, more abstract- the characters are aiming for while the latter can be nebulously defined as “things don't go as planned”- and it is just that in the comic. The former gets even the smallest validity to namedropping Jung or Platonic realism in how you could portray it while the latter makes it completely arbitrary and you can just drop “Platonic” to simply leave it as “idealism.” Yes, there is alchemy, that's about all that's left of Plato when you actually get into the meat of the work- without the last minute inclusions which are ultimately meaningless details to how the story is interpreted unless you're actively looking for INTENT like I do- and that was more of Aristotle's thing anyway since Plato's theory of Form was a soft rejection of elemental primacy.)

That's poignant and doesn't take hours of endless theorycrafting. But, in the story, no one really cares about the game and we have all this intellectual baggage in the background of people talking about nothing and dumb jokes taken at the expense of the comic itself essentially. In the end, did Homestuck have to stick the landing to be good? No. Would it be incredibly profound if it did? Yes. Is it worth the effort? Eeeeeeeeeeh, I don't know. Especially because it wouldn't be incredibly profound for everyone even if it did “stick the landing”, it would have to “stick the landing” and still appeal to appeal to a good number of people. What good is art if it doesn't resonate with people? An ex-wife, I guess.

>>466
>They are not abstractions with fundamental qualities that can be observed (recollected), they are just things that independently (acausally) exist.
It's a post-modern deconstruction of platonic forms, chud.

>Nepeta is a proto-calliope, she's also kind of a neo-GREEN
Don't make so many SMURFING characters then, DEEEEEEEEERSITE

>>466
>>467
Since I only own the first two HS books, I've never read the author commentary this deep in… pretty pleased with himself, isn't he?
I am pretty willing to buy into Hu¢¢ie's FORMS so far as the original four Beta Kids. Yes, it's true that things lean toward tortured/fake territory by the time Dave is introduced though. John and Rose are solidly Dork Boy and Lit Girl, but Dave and his Hipster/Wigger/Author Insert medley is too instantly read as neurotic to embody "cool".
And.
The idea of the Alpha kids representing "platonic forms" pulled from anything real is where my eyerolls peaked. Three quarters of the Alphas suffer from the Dave/GREEN problem, where their interests are so hodgepodge, and living circumstances so fantastical that it's impossible to imagine them arising ANYWHERE.
A tipsy-flirty-party-gamer girl who lives stranded in a future Water World, talks to like three other people total, and does heckin' cat science. I think there's an attempted justification behind Roxy's thirst as loneliness due to living on Water World, but she should be utterly batshit crazy. She's like the chill voice of reason when the time the cast assembles.
Trolls were excusable thanks to their obvious gimmicks, but by the Alpha Kids, there's an unshakable sense that even the Serious characters were born as lists of traits/composites designed to rhymes with some earlier bit in the story, rather than interiority or psychology.

If every character is written out to be some derivation that ultimately distills down to the two cherub godlings as reflections of Hu¢¢ie… Well, Rose and Dave were a way more charming take on this wanky idea. Both cherubs are vomit inducing.

On Dream selves, yes. A great concept that amounted to "extra life lol".

As for that large, highlighted commentary snippet (1757181980815-2.png), I think Huss has convinced himself of this. Mostly cope for how the comic turned out ("I meant to do that")
Decently clever cope, and it would actually work as a baked-in theme (especially if user prompts and their consequences were kept on as a practice) if there were anything to buttress it. Most of what Homestuck ends up spending runtime on is, like, massaging things to fit into some Alpha Timeline fate that doesn't accept deviations or path-forging…
Old adventure games like King's Quest had Perfect Scores that you could easily miss out on just dicking around in a normal playthrough. There, perfectly reusable following-the-guidelines flawless ideal vs. making imperfectly personal memories setup. Work some of that in! Evidence that Hu¢¢ie ever played a video game is still elusive.
I get that Homestuck hardly turned out perfect, but Huss could've shown actual evidence of the gap between Ideal and Real if he intended this seriously. Like, all 8 human players clear their session as God Tiers (even through various shortcuts and misadventures) .Their social development is universally SMURFED, of course, but that's a given for every character from the start, but what are we supposed to believe some Ideal Rose would have done differently?

>>472
>I am pretty willing to buy into Hu¢¢ie's FORMS so far as the original four Beta Kids. Yes, it's true that things lean toward tortured/fake territory by the time Dave is introduced though. John and Rose are solidly Dork Boy and Lit Girl
He doesn't really make this argument, I don't even think the intent is there. Because, again, they're all just sort of meant to be him.

He only throws around "platonic ideal" for the Guardians and AR. For the trolls, he just calls them "Internet archetypes"

The way I've formatted this rambling is kind of misleading because it's really two (2) ideas grafted together (1. The lack of Jung and how it would relate to Plato. 2. Trying to discern what Plato actually did for the comic.)

When I said Dave muddled the waters, I'm referring to his Guardian's associated obsession being sort of ambiguous and sort of redundant. In my view, the harlequins/wizards/puppets were all meant to (or should be) be Jungian archetypes and representative of their relationships with their guardians. John is the Hero (a Zanni specifically) and he thinks his father doesn't take him seriously, Rose is the Sage and thinks her mom is taking everything too seriously, Dave is the Everyman/Jester and worries that he's too derivative of Bro. In all cases, the Kids are wrong to some extent (Dad is overly sincere, Mom is just reflecting Rose's energy, and Bro is trying to help Dave spread his wings. Both John and Rose worry that their parents think they're incapable of doing things but for different reasons. John thinks Dad sees him as an idiot while Rose has wizard angst about Mom not thinking she can doing anything beyond blabber. Reread the wizard fanfictions) The puppet thing is too closely related to harlequins though and the symbolism for them is vague enough to where you can argue whether Dave wants a sense of belonging (Everyman) or just wants to have fun (Jester) The former is more significant character-wise and the latter muddles the symbology so I go with the former.

GREEN and taxidermized shit is so nebulous thematically. I can only really read it as Poppop viewing GREEN as already dead because he has her Dream Self's body (and he's also just, not there for her?) but that's as far as it goes. "GREEN breaks all the patterns" and this is one that nosedives all of our potential character bases in the comic.

>but that's a given for every character from the start, but what are we supposed to believe some Ideal Rose would have done differently?
Presumably she wouldn't have gone grimdark and jobbed but the end results of such a thing are identical because making the Green Sun was predestined.

The problem is that all the deviation is predestined. Karkat rushing the game that caused "SOMETHING BAD TO HAPPEN" is predestined so what the SMURF is the deviation? They created the ideal through SMURFING up that they must deviate from and it's… not their ideal, nobody gave a SMURF about defeating Lord English. Now I'm not going to mentally backtrack to conclude that the predestination of The Alpha Timeline was based in free-will SMURF-ups (or even just SMURF-ups.) None of them were about "ideals", that I know. But you definitely can't say all the characters (that are alive by the end) could have done better or had a definitive moment where they SMURFED up and had to learn from it. And the few that do, even the ones that read as forced and hackneyed (Karkat and Terezi) can be explained away by TIME LOOPS. Always with the SMURFING TIME LOOPS. Then we get into the question of free will under that and what that even means (what if they deviated in a way that wasn't failing in this specific way, what about those Doomed Timelines?) and what exactly the symbolism is of them making the Form (perfection; albeit a sort of distorted, grotesque parody) from failing to achieve goals but again, Lord English has no personal significance to anyone. At most, he has like, Alt!Calliope, Calliope, Jake, and Cronus? Maybe?

>>473
>I can only really read it as Poppop viewing GREEN as already dead because he has her Dream Self's body
Also, POPPOP ON THE GOLDEN SHIP ALERT.

Poppop is Alpha John Crocker. GREEN's is Grandpa.

>>475
I thought he was referred to as Pa by GREEN but even that's not true. I was very confused.

I have read more about alchemy and have come to the conclusion that I didn't know nearly enough about alchemy before and don't know enough now. At least I know a possible reason why John's associated item was oil now.

All this time I thought MSPAF would host images for the users, at least

>>565
I think you can find that adventure really easily if you look up Evangelion up on MSPFA. I think I saw it.

Homesmut artists will draw porn of a teenager and have "proship dni!!!" in their bio.

Whatever that means.

>Real instruments wouldn't make a difference
LISTEN. I WAS NEVER BOOKSMART. I WAS ALWAYS MONEY SMART. YOU DON'T NEED THAT MANY PEOPLE, IT'S NOT THAT HARD, FOBBY.

>>570
The Nepeta spite is more real because she has more dedicated fans.
Also
>sC

Also, also, whatever.

>>571
Heavily doubt he thinks about Feferi at all.

>>572
He calls her boring in the commentaries which as I've said, is a cope. He really doesn't like to acknowledge wasted potential. I don't think he does at all, ever.

New Rose IDE: Buck Breaker Rose

>>571
>>572
>>573
Feferi was mostly an after thought but there was the seed of something there…

>>575
The trolls were basically all afterthoughts. He just grafted more interesting stuff onto the "main" ones later. This is opposed to the original Kids who all had their personalities and basic conflicts understood from the get-go. The degrees varies from troll to troll. I could go one by one but nobody gives a shit…

>>576
>I could go one by one
P-p-please?

>>577
I mean, I don't know if you read me and realized I had already written out or just got lucky but FINE, SURE, I GUESS.

"Karkat? Basically an afterthought. Meant to be the archetypal troll alongside Terezi. Him being burnt out and prickly because of every troll being smurfing insane, murder being fairly normalized, and there being hatelove is something that comes out later and makes him a complete (and good, before the fall,) character. (I'd say Karkat only stopped being Karkat after he let Gamzee wwalk free. Karkat not killing Gamzee but pacifing him is completely in-character because he takes troll social etiquette deathly seriously. It's only the fact that he lets him smurf around afterwards instead of locking him in the stupid fridge or at least monitoring him that it feels like a spit in the face of Karkat and the audience.)

Gamzee? Complete afterthought. I forget when the bloodline thing was mentioned but that's the extent of him.

Terezi? Fairly well-realized on introduction, it's basically all downhill from here for her. She really leads the charge in showing how dystopian and warped troll society is so we can kind of thank her for that.

Sollux? Complete afterthought. Plot device. I forget when the “I can hear the souls of the future dead” thing comes up- isn't it in the walkaround before Murderstuck? I feel like it's immediately set up and resolved.

Tavros? I guess, basically complete from the beginning. You get his deal of “Wow, you can't force this dude to do anything because he's so flaky” and he lets Vriska wwalk all over him and that's basically how he stays for all of the comic.

Aradia? Afterthought. Plot device. Got “fun” developments of changing personalities three times.

Nepeta? I guess completely established since her unrequited love for

Karkat is basically her core conflict. But she's not much.

Vriska? I've been over this. Basically switches character concepts three times (while staying in the same body and having no real explanation, unlike Aradia) because she was the author's pet because he thought she was funny and she got a big reaction from the audience.

Equius? Probably the best realized character upon his introduction (and definitely one of the most realized characters in the comic as whole.) His conflicts are made clear, his characterization doesn't warp, he's centered in the world before his introduction, and he does things that are relevant to him with varying degrees of importance. This is because he's a Hu¢¢ie self-insert so more care was put into him.

Kanaya? Complete afterthought. Plot device.

Eridan? Well-realized but you can kind of tell Hu¢¢ie isn't going to do anything meaningful with him (No, I don't consider the flip-out meaningful to him as a character.)

Feferi? Same as Eridan, cutely enough. That feeling that their core traits and goals won't affect the story is overwhelming here; that's why Eridan and Feferi are “afterthoughts.”

So that's 6/12 or 9/12 of the trolls (depending on your definition; do you think their observable use to the plot, other characters, and world is key? Nepeta, Eridan, and Feferi then count as “afterthoughts” since Nepeta does nothing and it was immediately apparent that neither Eridan nor Feferi's “things” would matter in the grand scheme of the comic since they were introduced so late and didn't have that many- or even any at all, I forget- logs before their introduction. Yes, they “do things” but the creation of dreambubbles is a token moment so that Feferi isn't completely useless and Eridan taking Feferi and himself out is essentially a null outcome. Neither are really related to their core characterization, I'd argue. Eridan is somewhat cowardly but again, let's beat a dead HORSE, the murder arc sucks. And yes, they do do other things but nothing that'd justify them existing beyond the quota.) that are basically afterthoughts. Only Tavros and Equius came out of the oven as fully realized characters that didn't get radically altered by future context (like the existence and prevalence of FLARP) Terezi was a fully realized character that got bogged down by her future usage (she tricked Dave into getting himself killed but she's sad about it, BAAAAAAAAWWWW) Of those three, only two get a character arc and one of them is literally caused by fusing with another character while the other is technically wrong (since it's a different Terezi- I guess she just didn't get to act on an impulse and then that was the change needed to completely change a relationship?) and also effectively wrong because of how poorly it's written. Such so that I refuse to acknowledge it as an actual character arc. Tavros got a story arc. That's different. "

>>579
Y'know, how come Vriska practically looks like an "evil version" of GREEN?
It's something I immediatly picked up on when I first read Woodstock when I was like 12 but eventually assumed was just a result of being repetitive.

>>579
>The REALLY exaggerated fangs
Would have made the scorpion theming more clear. Double pincer horns was a bad look though, he made the right call. Also, Vriska having a lisp would have made her more endearing. This is grafted onto Sollux instead who, sure, fine, does have very big fangs. But I don't know, two characters having a lisp isn't a big ask since you also have two characters that are constantly screaming (Karkat and Terezi) and a whole bunch of characters who need glasses and such.

I remember when Sollux's quote was his little quip about not asking about disability and mortality. The Wiki (I checked it for a quick look at Sollux's sprite) seems to have gone through a progressive effort of ENDEEPENING where they make characters seem more complex than they actually are and update character descriptions to better fit the "narrative" (as in, what the author wants you to believe was always the case, what is being told to you, not actual story or character developments)

Post-canon is infecting the fandom's perception, especially secondaries.
>>580
>Y'know, how come Vriska practically looks like an "evil version" of GREEN
Because they were both supposed to be a parody of Mary Sues (which Hu¢¢ie is too cowardly to outwardly admit because it's a "trope" or an observation that someone else made) and were supposed to (/do) share the same aspect of gobbledygook.