Seeing as there's been all this sidebar conversation and I will talk about the quests until I'm blue in the face, I don't think a thread is unwarranted >u< For those out of the loop, Rubyquest was a webcomic-like audience participation adventure, similar to Homestuck's early chapters, run by a user called Weaver. Rubyquest was produced/run during a few months one winter as Weaver struggled with a disfavorable real life, and Nanquest was the spiritual successor run over the course of the next few years, just finishing up last year, to fans' delight. Rubyquest is about a woman who wakes up with little memory in some sort of weird laboratory that seems to have been used for human experimentation, and things go downhill from there. Nanquest is about a woman who probably goes to a hotel to fix a broken light, but the hotel is empty and more dilapidated than expected, and things go downhill from there. Cosmic terrors, body horror, tw sexual abuse mentions and an on-screen, thwarted abuse attempt in nanquest. Both are horror games/comics and can be quite freaky to read, so I would recommend tackling them with lights ON if you're interested. Do you want to read Rubyquest or Nanquest in long form, on /tg/ like they were run? Do you want to read Rubyquest or Nanquest in an easy format? Did you know Weaver hosted Socratic discussion threads about the secrets of the quests after both ended? Did you know a cool guy wrote a lot of music for the quests? Did you know rubyquest was based off a free to play indie horror game that, while it has its indie game flaws (animu art), is really fun to play? Here's a link to the author's current tumblr, but BEFORE YOU ENTER, please know that a lot of what he does these days is pornography, and usually fur pornography, so if you're mostly interested in the quests, it would be best to navigate his tumblr with his tags!! Even the tags /rubyquest and /nanquest will not be entirely free of nsfw art so please be warned. http://tgweaver.tumblr.com/ I wouldn't say I'm "obsessed" with the quests but it's sure hard to get me to shut up about them if you show interest... EDIT: And to link one more thing, I remembered after the fact that Weaver started though did not finish a behind the scenes look at rubyquest on his tumblr, which both does a little explaining and discusses his own feelings about the work, how it progressed, and why he made the choices he did. The few installments of it can be found on a tag in his tumblr right here. EDIT: and for in-depth discussions of things that happen later in the quests, please spoiler bar relevant information; I know a lot of people haven't read both yet and there are spoilers that could significantly reduce reader enjoyment.
Spoiler I was very glad Santiago got out at the end. :) He was my favourite other character! Though I do wonder what it is that make his face a rat face..
Spoiler: Best Friend Santiago He's meant to be a rat?... I just saw him as 'distrustable fox part two' I was soooo happy about the end of nanquest. Though I was for nan refusing help from either pablo or santi, I felt santi was objectively the better helpchoice, and was glad that at least ONE of them lived. In the discussion thread he mentions that nan purposefully doesn't end up with a romantic endgame because it just wasn't the story for that, there was no one who would be good for her in the end and the themes didn't play into it like they did in rubyquest, so in the end, she's buying santiago ice cream. I REALLY like that. I really like both that second chance and how much Weaver tries to keep things consistent, not pander anyone if he feels like the audience hasn't earned what they want in some way. I also thought it was cute that Weaver doesn't get santi's fans >u< I guess I can't explain it either...
It did! I believe the song was the inspiration for the setting/general concept of nanquest and you can guess a lot about the characters and tone from it, but Weaver makes sure people know that insofar as the song has a plot, nanquest doesn't follow it, and no one should feel that the song would give them perfect guidance on how to play the game. Of course, now that the game's over, there's no reason to warn people to not try to play the game with the song, all you have to know is you couldn't guess how the game goes by listening to it ^u^ Nan ended up being my favorite out of the two... just because Weaver grew to be a better storyteller and artist over time, personal preferences aside. I would reccomend people read them in longform on /tg/ but god knows I would never have read rubyquest if I just had to start with that ha ha
Spoiler: SANTIAGO also, was he supposed to have ended up a smol child with santiago brain and appearance at the end? Like how kim was like, 10-14 range, but had her memories and stuff or is he just really fucking short when not in the hotel
Spoiler: BEST!! FRIEND!! He's meant to be a child at the end! It's talked about in the discussion I linked; for whatever reason, he was regressed bodily (and possibly mentally, though to what degree I don't know) to a child, probably in order to be given a second chance. Probably for that reason, though how or why exactly that was done, and by who, is still up in the air, and always will be, knowing Weaver. He seems to write intuitively rather than by a set in stone plan. I guess you could see it, in a meta way, as the reward for the players of the game choosing Santiago: he, specifically, is given another chance, because people liked him and wanted to be around him. That's one reason I, like every other quest fan, wishes that it could be a video game. I DESPERATELY want to see the different character endings based on who the player chooses in that altar room with Lorenzo...
Spoiler I wonder if it was to give him a new chance starting from before the knife incident happened with his dad happened give him a better childhood, even if he is an adult mind i feel like he'll have fun getting free shit just cause he is small :P
Wow, that was good. Spoiler why did Santiago and Kim get pulled back in, at the end? I was not clear on that...
@Kaylotta Spoiler I think Kim just tripped? she had half her vision gone, and it was kinda falling apart, I assumed she fell. though yeah it would seem there shouldve been a more reason for it... hmm
Oh man I love RubyQuest! I seem to recall stumbling across it in high school and discovering a love for that kind of horror. The Barbed Wheel remains a favourite thing of mine as one of my first encounters with cosmic horror and series-spanning mythos. RubyQuest has a special place in my heart also for leading me to find RWBYQuest, a RubyQuest-styled RWBY adventure that is so good I legit lost interest in the main show. RWBYQuest did RWBY better than Rooster Teeth ever will. I hadn't heard NanQuest was finished and readable in longform! I'll have to read that!
Spoiler: Kim all I can think is that, logically, there should be a callback to when nan had to drag kim out of the furnace, but it was just a shadow masquerading as kim so nan's good intentions (well, the players') were mislead. Maybe it was a final test to see if goodwill still won out beyond doubts in the audience to preserve good ending but idk. Weaver presses on confirming how well meaning the players are and making them earn their ending. I wonder if it was somehow a consequence of Kim being attacked and blackened by the Padre, it was hard for her to leave, but that leads you to wonder about the nature of the ending, whether there was some part of the demon still in the hotel, and how they escaped if so. Idk Btw the name of the four-horn demon creature can be found in the socratic discussion along with the etymology of the name but I don't say it personally bc Fear. Look it up yourselves >u< I'm just glad I indirectly told so many that nanquest was finished so they could read it!! Please enjoy it, weaver did a good job with this one! Spoiler I'm very fond of the barbed wheel too. Idk if it's meant to be a callback to the eight-spoked chaos wheel symbol but I'm delighted if so. The subtle imagery is great--the perfection of the orderly circle, violently disrupted. And all of ruby's gorgeous red visions, the symbols on the walls--ace's unbelievably designed bedroom--theres such a rich myth history to rubyquest made even richer by being left incomplete, suggesting but never confirming. Ahhhh <3 Ruby opened a new love for cosmic horror in me too. It's just done so well, left as an undertone of otherness in a mostly technological environment. You get pages and pages of keys and lockers and doors and codes and then a single, undiscussed panel of the dissapearing brig.... Fixed errors bc mobile posting
I did some edits to the top post to link another cool rubyquest thing I recalled and to give a more adequate warning about the sexual abuse content in nanquest since I recalled that there was an onscreen attempt rather than just recollections. I am an attack survivor and it didn't get to me, but everyone is affected by different things, so I want people to go into the quest with as much knowledge as possible. Look after yourselves : 3
NANQUEST IS DONE??? /scurries off to read what animal crossing character is next do you think (assuming a new one will be made) personally i want whitney or lucky but i noticed the quest characters are both girls and "prey" animals, so a wolf and a boy dog prob wouldnt fit
Man no one knew when Weaver finished up nan!! I think it was on purpose--he wanted a small audience to make the final choices easy to manage. Gotta let people have their say without flooding /tg/ The consequence is that no one has not been surprised when nan was finished >u< I only knew bc I have been watching actively. Guess the job is mine to spread the word!!
i used to read avidly a few years ago. i think i stopped sometime around the timeskippy cave area (if im remembering right) because thats when it was dead FOREVERRRRRRRrrrrrrr i never followed /tg/ actively, though, and i definitely only read rubyquest on the easy-to-navigate hosting website.
Yeah, I think a lot of people stopped reading then. Logically enough, since it was dead for a long time, and I was very surprised when it wasn't dropped permanently! You know all I was still thinking of Santiago and Spoiler: Nanquest spoilers I just think his overall arc is so fascinating. You wouldn't guess anything, really, about his character based on the threatening anarchist you get the first few times you see him. For a while I was unsure about it since he seems almost too different before and after Henry's death, but Weaver addressed that directly, saying basically that yeah he was completely under Henry's thumb and lying to himself to make himself believe he was ok with that, so once he's actually free and has changed his opinion on Nan he basically has no clue what to do with himself, in the zone between one worldview collapsing and another being set up where you just kinna... do things And about that attempted rape (?) scene with him and Nan good gosh is that wild in retrospect. Like, the implication is that... actually let's let Weaver tell it I don't even know what I'm trying to say about it like HOW FUCKED UP IS THAT the whole post-quest discussion is brain candy to me. What a weird character. Someone who it turns out wasn't a free agent but was telling himself he was, someone who has absolutely no clue what to do with his own life and no clue what he wants or how to achieve what he wants--but you really have to pick that out to find it. As Weaver said there's a good chance that assault was scripted so that Henry could save Nan and look like the good guy to her and just HOLY SHIT DAMN How fucked up is that.
Spoiler Yeah, I absolutely picked up on the subtext of Santiago being a survivor of CSA. The language he used was just so weird to the situation, it seemed really personal to him and not to what was happening with Nan. Now, there's a chance that Henry made Santiago 'attempt rape' so he could be the hero, but I also feel as a Santiago fan that it's also very possible Henry just told Santiago to attack Nan, and Santiago was the one who chose the method. If so, why that method? He's in a miserable situation re: Henry, he's trying to wrap himself around it by telling himself he's TOTALLY FREE and freedom from morals is TRUE FREEDOM, so maybe he was trying to... work out some of his own trauma in the worst way possible, knowing he'd be stopped? Trying to break himself of his last morals? Whatever was going on, it's an important point that he was crying before he got physically hurt and then betrayed there, so I am pretty sure he did not end up enjoying what he was doing. None of which negates the trauma on Nan!
