Popping in to say, holy hell I am dense. Gamzee can't be metaphorically fridged, so he has been literally fridged. He's been functionally dead since he got put in the fucking fridge.
He can't fucking die because of bullshit clown rules, this is as close to dead as a bullshit clown can possibly get. That's why he's not doing anything, that's why he hasn't been able to get out of there, because he's the fucking equivalent to dead! And possibly regular dead, not Homestuck dead, because it seems like there's no way for him to get out of it of his own accord. Oh my god. (This has been bugging me for a while, I am glad to have sorted it out for myself.)
:D :D :D I do feel bad for the bullshit clown though. Hell, even Aranea got to go on with the rest of the dream ghosts and at least some instance of Vriska. Assuming that Aradia was herding them to the actual afterlife anyway. Gamzee though is paying for his being an unkillable bullshit clown and he doesn't deserve this anymore than Porky deserved the Perfectly Safe Capsule.
I think it also completes the time loop where he sets up the cherubs's room and such so he's also just fridged until the plot needs him for that and being Caliborn's guide
I am perpetually unsure of how I feel about Gamzee, but I would be uncomfortable with that ending for most people. LET GAMZEE SAY FUCK OUT OF THE FRIDGE in an environment where that wouln't fuck everything up somehow.
I am pretty well decided on fucking hating him because I just him kind of eh at best. Which is weird to say I guess. But I am a strange woman who saves her fiercest hate for what bores her. he needs out of the fridge tho and to move on
*quietly writes fanfic where Gamzee has a soft sweater, hot chocolate and appointments with a good therapist.*
Hokay, so. Cherub writeup. This is probably going to wind up being A Thing. Spoiler So this is such a mobius double reacharound literal clusterfuck that i barely know where to start, so I guess I'll start with my reading of what actually happens in the flash. Alt!Calliope raises her baton signalling the start of the Symphony, impossible to play or otherwise, and the End of Homestuck. She then activates some suspiciously LE-like glowy eye bullshit (Yaldabaoth's boon to the Martyr?) summons, invokes and/or creates three spheres and absorbs them to become a black hole. Personally, my money is on somehow absorbing the essences of all three universes we see in Homestuck (but presumably not the literal mass, which for A and B at least is already in the Green Sun), thus causing her to exceed some sort of metaphysical Schwartzchild radius, but really who knows. The last we see of her is the Space symbol of her god hood as she becomes the first thing trapped in her black hole. The black hole then siphons off the mass of the Green Sun in standard binary star/black hole fashion, growing larger as it does. As it absorbs the last of the green sun, a couple things happen. First off, the power source of the First Guardians is destroyed. Sidetrack for a minute here, because this explains a couple things we already knew. We know from this conversation way back in Act 6 Intermission 1 that the Green Sun only presides over a subset of universes and their associated sessions "like a giant solar system". Time and space are inextricably intertwined in the Furthest Ring where the Green Sun exists, so in order for its light to not reach every universe within the (presumably infinite) Furthest Ring, it must be finite in both time and space (because one is the other). Thus having a defined start point - it's inadvertent creation by Dave and Rose due to the manipulations of Doc Scratch on behalf of Lord English - and a defined end point - being consumed by Calliope's black hole - limit the "spacial" extent of its "solar system" of universes in the Furthest ring. Also notice how Caliborn, the Lord of Time, is the creator there and the Muse of Space Calliope is the destroyer? Yyyyeah, that's gonna keep happening. Anyways, Lord English's final staredown with Vriska and the Ghost Army is circumstantially simultaneous with this destruction, as can be seen by the green flames of the First Guardian powers he inherited from a million Scratches flickering out. What, if anything, this does to his double-death laser and assorted other bullshit is unclear and irrelevant. His eyes switching to c (8) n (8) ↄ though, is probably very relevant because of the other thing that the Black Hole does at this point. Namely, it's massive enough to start seriously warping the space-time around it. Okay, whatever, spacetime in the Furthest Ring is massively warped already... except that Caliborn/LE had just spent who knows how long rampaging through the Void, leaving very defined cracks on what was once "Like a star chart with no stars." and eventually defining a region of space (yes, i know. more inversions!) around the Green Sun as explained by Vriska back here and here. Starting at 4:46 in [S] Act 7, you can see cracks propagating inward from this ring towards Calliope's black hole as the warped and unnaturally defined space-time starts to shatter and fall inward into it. It's unclear whether the Black Hole stops at this ring or swallows up all of Paradox Space, but I'm willing to bet it's the former. (if it was the latter, though, that doesn't affect anything that happened "before" or "after" -- non-linearity means it's only one point in the Furthest Ring. Just, you know, steer clear of the End of All Things and you'll be fine. hell, if there's only a temporal end point and not a start point, that doesn't even challenge the Furthest Ring being infinite!) In either case, the defining feature of a black hole is that it's a pocket of spacetime from which you don't get out, ever. Eight ball (in LE's eyes) in the pocket means the game's over, one way or another, and the comic ends with LE trapped, both in the inescapable black hole that Calliope made and in the story Homestuck itself, as it ends without a way out for him, as I talked about above. If the juju actually does anything when Vriska pulls it on LE (rather than having already done all it's LE-opposing when John touched it, which is also an option) it does this: the story's over, but you don't get to leave. ..fuck. Calliope and Caliborn are on some level stand-ins for the fandom. DON'T FORGET, YOU'RE HERE FOREVER. YOU CAN'T ESCAPE THE HOMESTUCK. *ahem* IN ANY CASE, inversions. LE defines the Space in which the black hole will take shape by his cracks, while Alt!Calliope defines the Time at which it happens. Caliborn creates the story Homestuck itself, cyclically: first starting with his mocking HOMOSUCK, then progressing to his Masterpeice which actually reveals part of the story, and then finally by the actual action of trapping the beta kids in the Homestuck Juju for seven years as we watch this all play out. Alt!Calliope? Ends it. And traps Caliborn, Doc Scratch (both in the person of LE), Hussie, and Vriska, to boot. Everyone who was ever a narrator is stuck in the black hole with no way out. If that's not a decisive way to end a fucking story, I don't know what is. (calling it now: the epilogue will have no narration and possibly no dialogue) Each one eats the other's tail, forever. Speaking of which, the whole shit with the cracks and the explosions is a colossal ouroboros clusterfuck of people playing eachother for suckers while themselves getting played by the people they were playing. I'm not suuuure how well I remember all of it, so this might be inaccurate and need a rewrite once I've done my final readthrough in a while, but as far as I can remember: Lord English begins his Furthest Ring fracturing rampage in the hopes of flushing out Calliope to destroy her permanently and end her threat to him, Vriska starts luring him along with the ghost army mk. 1 to get shattered reference points to steer by in search of the treasure, but in doing so puts herself, or her coat rather, in the right place at the right time to be snagged by Kurloz, presumably as an ingredient in the visually similar Cairo Overcoat that LE uses to travel through the Furthest Ring and to time-travel in universes when he is summoned at their end, thus aiding in empowering LE in the first place. Temporally elseways, the completion of the ring of cracks does in fact lure both "our" Calliope and Alt!Calliope out of their respective hiding places into the open where they could conceivably be destroyed by LE, but he is distracted by the ghost army mk. 2 and Vriska with the juju when Alt!Calliope uses that selfsame ring of cracks to trap them all, as described above. So the whole cherubim thing wraps up more or less within itself, with minimal input from any of our heroes, with the exception of the two other narrators: Hussie who (inadvertently?) assisted Caliborn in becoming Lord English through the authorlogs and Vriska who helped to create the whole mess, like she does, and was appropriately ensnared within it when it went completely fucking pear shaped. So the whole thing plays out as this self-fulfilling knot of three gods. One who cares about nothing but her ultimate end that she never had any option of altering, because her adherence to the rules meant that there was no alternate choices she was willing to make as she hurtled down her single non-diverging timeline. One who cares about everything insofar as he wants to rule it or blow it to kingdom come, who couldn't break the rules so he broke the whole damn game instead, and who's timeline is so fucked up that a key piece of becoming his final form rests on a future that technically never happened and never will happen in canon. And the last, who cares so much about herself and being important that she stepped into the middle of this clustefuck of her own volition. Twice. And where does that leave our Calliope in this? Absolutely nowhere, which is the best possible option for her: the others get to play out universe-shattering drama that changes the face of the multiverse itself, she gets to have a life.
Personally, I love Gamzee Makara. For a lot of reasons, whatever, irrelevant. And I'm... well, for one thing, that was bullshit. As many have said, the greatest weakness of the Homestuck ending is how many stories, especially character stories, were either left unfinished or dropped at a weird point and not picked back up, especially when the narrative seemed to promise more. Sollux, Jane, Karkat, Kanaya, Dave, Gamzee, ect. All of them were supposed to, to our knowledge, Do Something More, especially considering all the unresolved struggles near the end of acts 5 and 6.(I'm most upset about Karkat, but that's for another meta post I'll probably never write.) Gamzee... uh... what the hell was that. I try not to be too salty about this, but Gamzee was a little... typecast? A soda-drinking, ICP-loving, urban trash-coded kid with an absent father--absent everyone--who turns to drugs while very young to deal with his mental stress and private misery turns into a murderous bad guy and flips when he's off his meds drugs. The fact that that was his character was bad enough, but the fact that that was the end of things and after that, he was more or less locked up permanently... oh, after flipping out and beating up his girlfriend? Thanks. That's really stereotypical. In other words there's a whole lot about his story that I just... feel uncomfortable about. Maybe it's just that we see him trying so hard to be positive and see the good things in life and love things before the flip out. Maybe it's misplaced sympathy. Who fucking knows. Anyway, I don't think the villain should have been him. He had cards stacked against him from the start and he only flipped out after trying really hard for a really long time. For what could have been another one of homestuck's shocking, twists-and-turns character stories, that ended on a dead note. Metaphorically in prison forever after failing to rehabilitate from drugs and never getting the help he needed aside from one frightened moirail who still feels miserable about failing him. Ok?... That storyline died. A lot of them did and this isn't the one that bothers me most. (#KarkatwasmeantforMORE) On the other hand, however, the fridge saga is still making me chortle. He's been fridged. He's freaking fridged. Comically this fulfills me.
@littlewhitemouse HEAR FUCKING HEAR. On that note - as I said in the tags of a recent post: if a goatish curly-mopped young man with a love of clowns and a convoluted way of speaking makes it into any of my original fic, well won't that just be one heck of a coincidence?
Oh thank God I'm not the only one who hated it. The art was beautiful but it didn't feel like an ending at all because so much was left undone and unexplained, and worse I can see really obvious things I would have put in if I was Hussie. I feel massively let down and it's come on the heels of other enraging things and now I'm crying out of anger and I don't know how I'm going to get to sleep or ever really enjoy anything Homestuckish again. I still have that giant AU fic I was supposed to be co-writing and abandoned because of family problems and now I'm too disappointed in the source material to want to touch it but I can't let people down too D: I had to get a non-Homestuck friend to talk me out of a meltdown over it because nobody else is up, and I compared it to Snape randomly vanishing before the Battle of Hogwarts. Come on, Hussie, I know you're better than this.
@littlewhitemouse yeah, that's the one thing in the ending that kinda left a bad taste in my mouth. I loved it in general, I think Homestuck is too much of A Thing for me for me to even be capable of being disappointed or unhappy with the ending, but I really do wish Andrew had jumped that particular narrative train off the tracks at the last moment.
No, you're not. The opinions on the ending are very polarized from what I've seen. Either people furiously fucking hate it or they are filled with love and delight even if it has problems. There are also people in the middle of the emotional hell cart of course. Friend of mine is just pleasantly satisfied with the ending. First off because the comic actually ended and secondly because to him it very neatly wrapped up. Perhaps not in terms of individual character arcs but in terms of the broader picture it did. All the little details and threads of what happened in Act 7 came together in a way he describes as being simple and tidy. To the extent that people are upset because of that. I personally am satisfied that it's over and more just very happy that it has been the sort of ending that is free to interpretations. I am free to dance about interpretations freely. That and I am very pleased with how very mythological it was. There was a post I read that the kids aren't gods and this isn't an epic but to me it is just that. The issue here is that my conception of what "god" means is different. Gods are just like us, but a bit stronger. Some are worthy of veneration. Others aren't. They feel pain and make mistakes and die. They don't always win. But they are gods and some of them at least are part of a grand mythological mesh. In a way god is just another sort of species. Even in Homestuck. A godtier isn't a great person worthy of stories just by way of being a godtier. But in another fashion a god is something so much more. A god is someone like Vriska who, even if not the greatest individual, did truly amazing things beyond the scope of normal mortals. Who has crossed into the strange realm of deification through heroism. We saw the epic struggle of a whole host of gods which reared up to a creation myth.
i have an extremely bad habit of writing fanfics where homestuck pops in out of goddamn nowhere, and if a certain fridge gets fedexed to one of my mains, well. won't that just be a bitch. (gamz needs loves, i don't even care. they'll sibling-adopt each other and smoke pot and it'll be chill)
I loved the art but as I said it doesn't feel like an ending. So many things were just dropped suddenly and things which looked to be building up to big twists weren't. I know I'm seriously overreacting but I feel like the ending took something very important to me and ruined it all. I don't even want to think about Homestuck ever again because of that feeling, but I owe it to a lot of people to finish that big fic of mine but it hurts to think about right now.
I like and dislike the ending. It's pretty complicated for me. My best explanation is that I love the ending--I love that animation, that art, that calliope and caliborn storyline, and that music and that tone--but I don't really like it as the end of homestuck. It would do very well as PART of the end of homestuck. Oh well.
