eh. go big or go home. just because you feel it didn't work doesn't mean that it wasn't an admirable attempt. I mean, you yourself said that you would have enjoyed the ending had a few more of the juggled chainsaws been caught, iirc, and that still would have broken many of those rules at once.
exactly. I do agree that one of the main problems with the ending is the character vs plot driven story one, where the ending was a mismatch for the kind of story homestuck was.
Again: Eh. Hussie arguably did not break some of them (Vriska isn't the main character just because she does some main character stuff), and could have broken a lot of those successfully. Failing in the execution doesn't mean 'shouldn't have broken them'. Also that photoset is a pedantic listing of rules and matching up what doesn't fit them and saying "This is what's wrong!" without... really seeming to understand what's actually weak structurally and what's just stuff they dislike (see also: the Vriska photo). Again, some good points, but also a lot of reaching of the kind I see new writers making when they criticize works.
I'm not quite sure of that. I mean, homestuck's always been pretty character-focused but very plot driven, in that for much of it the kids were getting pulled along in messes they couldn't entirely understand or deal with, and in that sense the ending fits, although it may not be satisfying. I guess the way to follow through with that in the epilogue would be to see how our characters react to it. Which, well, we'll see.
that is true! and to be honest if nothing else i think the ending fits homestuck, simply on the merit of being an indulgence of a fandom wide meme. the ending being that Homestuck is finally an anime is the most homestuck way the ending could have been.
i've always felt that homestuck hasn't been the same comic since the retcon began though. i remember a lot of people have had these feelings since that picturesque little slideshow about how awesome vriska made everything by being alive on the meteor. everything started being perfecty and going right for everyone because the comic was retconned into a completely different kind of story. probably unpopular opinion: i kinda wonder if the retcon was planned or if hussie wrote himself into a corner?
...I actually like Vriska's storyline more after reading that. I mean ... she wanted to be the Big Damn Hero and that's what she got. She got her showdown with the big bad guy, and she got a heroic death (as presumably she didn't survive the black hole). She got what she wanted, and then all the people who didn't want to be heroes but did it anyway or who were heroic just because they knew what the right thing to do was and then went and did it got to live happily ever after with their friends and loved ones, which was what they wanted. I don't care one way or another about Vriska herself, but I like that that's how her story ended. It feels fitting.
i liked the retcon stuff too, i just meant it was different. kinda like hussie wanted that stuff to happen but didn't know how to get there from where he was (without taking like 7 more years) so he scrapped it (s:game over) and started again with shenanigans.
Personally, I have felt a little weird about the comic since the retcon. Did I still enjoy it? Yes. But something I could never quite pin down felt off about the character writing since. Maybe it was just that so many conflicts and plot points seemed to be dropped out of relevance. Maybe it was that the character maturity they gained which let them no longer squabble and just accept their roles seemed rushed and sudden, despite there being excuses for that thing happening. Maybe it is my absolutely personal opinion of Vriska, which is not a high opinion. Of course I would feel a little unsettled about her existence apparently fixing everything, in a way everyone now agrees with and don't rally against at all, and if they do, someone else shushes them. Again since so much of it is personal opinion I don't know if I just dislike the tone after the retcon or if there is something objectively wrong with it but...I got through it by assuming it would be a fake out. It wasn't. I'm glad I stuck through for everything that happened (namely Davepeta, everything Davepeta does, and Davepeta smooches) but there's that.
As someone who loved and cackled my way through the first three acts like I may be fundamentally broken but I LOVE silly homestuck and silly homestuck antics. They are the heart and soul of this comic but I can't remember the last time a cake was thrown or someone fell down the stairs or an insanely stupid misunderstanding happened just because people couldn't stop throwing ludicrous insults long enough to talk things through. That's why Davepeta and Arquius were my favorite parts of later act six. ABSURD. C'est la vie I guess!
I'm part of the minority who actually liked the retcon stuff cause... I dunno I just thought it was interesting? It was something new! Something entirely new! Like someone's already said, Homestuck wrote its own fix-it fic! I'm not sure if I approve entirely out of a story-telling perspective, or if I'm more into the idea of it than what was actually done with it, but. I liiiiiked iiiittttt I'm trash okay I'm trash and while sometimes I enjoy things getting dark and bleak and pessimistic I also enjoyed the reboot from that (even though I would have liked it all a lot better if all the dream&deadselves got merged towards the end rather than... apparently being entirely irrelevant??) Anyways I think I've found a way to verbalise my biggest issue with A7 (and it isn't even about the plot! gasp!): It just doesn't feel like Homestuck. On one hand I'm glad we reached Peak Anime! (Look at us, we climbed this whole mountain.) But on the other, that means the ending has nearly nothing in common with the beginning, and the way the rest of the story has been told. We got no narration, no dialogue, no sprites no mspaint anything and not even any stupid jokes...? It just feels... so distant from the rest of the webcomic. (Part of me wants to be like 'but it's okay I'm sure the epilogue will BLOW US ALL AWAY' but most of me wants to Not Do That and stop putting pressure on Hussie. That poor man has suffered enough. Free him.)
The retcon felt too fast, too simple, and too easy to me, especially because there are disturbing aspects to it that were just papered over. Everyone seemed to have been parceled out in to their little separate groups and never really interacted with one another, with Terezi being isolated with Vriska and ending up acting exactly like someone who's been squashed under someone else's thumb for a few years. But nope! Apparently everything is just fine and everyone is perfectly well-adjusted, pay no attention to the depressed blind girl or the kid locked in the fridge. I think if the misery-and-despair part of Act 6 was the short part and the reset part were the long part it would work a lot better (especially if the whole TEREZI ACTS LIKE SOMEONE WHO HAS BEEN EMOTIONALLY ABUSED part were in any way addressed). But I suspect the reset was kind of a scramble to tie things up rather than being something well planned, because it feels pretty much like the kinds of scrambles to tie things up I wrote when I wrote a serial novel.
i'm probably at some point going to read the comic all in one go to see how different it feels compared to all spread out. i've been needing to anyways. i might wait until may when i'm out of this dang trailer but if someone organizes a reread on the forum ( i think a few people upthread have expressed the same plan as me iirc) i'll start whenever they do and we could do it all together. and discuss everything to death like an even nerdier than normal book club.
Don't apologize for liking it, there were plenty of enjoyable things. I still read it and liked it despite misgivings, and I'm glad I did! On a meta level it IS cool that it wrote its own fix-it fic, and I definitely liked how the retcon was done. If I didn't entirely like what the retcon did to the plot/the content of the fix-it fic, that's my business. I did like the lighter tone too, since there was a lot of calm relationship stuff for once instead of zany relationship antics that led to a lot of interesting scenes that people might have been to on guard to go through with before the retcon, like dave asking dirk how to come out (adorable) or calliope (both) having all those chill conversations about living and just having fun, which, they're trying to build a newer, safer universe to do that. A lot of cool stuff happened because of the retcon in other words and I fully give it its due. I may be mostly rallying against it Not Being The Same, though I think that's not totally illogical, as there were things I really expected to happen, as they were promised in the narrative, and the retcon made them impossible/unimportant. ...I guess that's the point of a retcon but. Eeeehhh. / sound of a horse balking at a gate Despite everything I enjoy new homestuck content. That is what I tell myself going into the epilogue. Despite everything I just enjoy this.
My biggest misgiving with post-retcon homestuck and the thing I feel most personally emotional about is Terezi: everything about. She doesn't act ok, she doesn't get the credit really for doing all of this, even though it was almost entirely her, her character trails off really uncomfortably in the end... seeing her passively agreeing with Vriska as if she wasn't even listening to what she was saying in order to examine and check it was the most un-Terezi and frightening thing to me. Terecita where ARE YOU
Yeah, I think out of everything, what happens with Terezi is the thing that bothers me the most about the retcon. And then the Remember flash was touching and powerful and... didn't seem to do anything. But Terezi was right back to making snarky quips when she met up with the Striders! What. If the story had done something more with that, like had used that as a jumping off point for subtle indications that all the kids were connecting to their other selves, it would have had a place, and Davepeta's infodump to Jade would have really fit rather than being a last minute handwave. idk. Everything from Game Over on seems like a rough sketch of what it should have been, which is symptomatic of an author who is at a point of "omfg I just want it DONE." Not that I blame Hussie for that, it's just a disappointment that it did come to that.
With regards to the juggled chainsaws, I was angry about those because they seemed to be set up specifically to cut through some of the threads of Vriska's plans, thus solving both the "what happened to whosits" questions and the plan-becomes-spoiler problem. Then they just got tossed up in the air and didn't come down again at all, nevermind anywhere near the plan threads. And this metaphor is kind of silly but you get my meaning. Okay, let me rephrase; I know there are right ways to break every one of those rules, but breaking all of those specific rules together in these specific ways at these specific points just resulted in what looks, to me, like a mess.
Agreed on that. Thinking about it, the dropped/vanished chainsaws are also a problem of overescalation and overemphasis - the stakes kept raising to impossible heights and toward the end EVERYTHING looked like it was given a huge amount of weight, but then a bunch of it just... poof! Gone.
