This has been bothering me for ages; does anyone know if the SBAHJ line about flying up to the sun like a big piece of garbage is supposed to be a Futurama reference? Because it sure sounds like one.
Everything in homestuck means something else, nothing can be taken at face value. So the answer is probably.
Is it just me or were the players throughout the comic remarkably incurious as to where the hell SBurb originally came from? Is the game God? Now I see why the quiz thought I'd be a Light player; I want to know! I also have a slight issue with the way Bro Strider's behaviour was dealt with. Yes, by normal standards it's abusive as fuck, but none of the guardians were particularly normal, except maybe John's dad in which his apparent normalcy was the gag - being a totally boring businessman while all the wackiness was happening around him. Rose's mother didn't seem to think Rose faking a suicide attempt in their strife was strange. Jade literally taxidermied her grandfather's corpse as a preteen, with remarkable skill too, and that didn't seem to mess her up in anything like a realistic way. So it seems kind of weird that Bro is the one whose weirdness we're supposed to take seriously. Just beating Dave, I would have taken with deadly seriousness, but beating him up with a puppet, while randomly teleporting?
I don't think anyone here has ever made the claim that Mom Lalonde wasn't abusive/neglectful in some way. In regards to the taxidermying, it's a family tradition, if I remember correctly. Not that it might not still fuck someone up, but it seemed like she'd grown up with taxidermy being a normal practice, and what one did with dead family members. In that regard, even the normalized funerary traditions that many people practice (wakes, memorials, etc.) could fuck a kid up, even though they're the accepted, societally-approved practices. But we also wouldn't think it weird if it didn't fuck a kid up, which could be the equivalent scenario here. Including Jade here is a bit odd to me, because if we're talking about "guardian behaviors" then we shouldn't be talking about what Jade does after the death of Grandpa, we should be talking about how he behaved towards her when he was alive.
I'm kind of referring to their home lives in general. I might be just bad at reading into things, but when the kids were introduced, it seemed to me that their weird guardians (or weird lack of in Jade's case) were supposed to be funny.
While Mom Lalonde's neglect seems to get downplayed in Homestuck, in Hiveswap, Joey recognizes both Mom and Grandpa as neglectful.
It was supposed to be funny because at that stage in the comic Hussie was still writing a lot of it for gags. He's even said of Bro that when he first wrote it he didn't actually have an idea in his head who or where Dave and Bro's parents were supposed to be, and he wrote them as brothers just dicking around being stupid shits. Its only later he went back and examined some of it and went "wow that's kind of fucked up actually, let's try to address it."
Spoiler for alcohol/suicide mention Spoiler Rose and Roxy’s issues could’ve been addressed better, but I’ve seen people give serious praise to how Roxy’s alcoholism was handled, So at least there’s that. Regarding the suicide threat specifically, that was an empty gesture on rose’s part and she and Mom both knew it. It was messed up, and It could’ve been taken more seriously, but it didn’t really have to be because it was as threatening as A Beautiful Pony.
i will say, taxidermy-ing a human is absolutely horrifying, even ignoring the process being intense. i choose to believe that it’s not quite so grotesque in homestuck as it would be here, but ymmv Spoiler: explanation, gross, dead dove?? the reason taxidermies look good is because there’s fur or feathers to cover up the seams and other evidence of the process. humans (and reptiles, fish, etc) don’t have that, so it’s very much going to look like skin stretched over a frame that’s not-quite-right, with visible seams (and we DO see some stitches on grandpa and jade’s taxidermied sprites, at least)
I want the super awesome classpect powers and I'd love a consort land of my own and I could handle a Denizen but the idea of SBurb happening has given me actual, literal nightmares.
I am mostly super not down with "hey you narrowly escaped death and everyone you know and love is now dead forever your planet is destroyed and it is on your shoulders to create an entirely new universe from scratch by winning this game so good fucking luck"
This is why I would try to break the game. Rose and Dave tried to break their own session; I would be throwing myself into making sure the game never happened again in any universe. Screw the powers and screw making more universes that will just inevitably be destroyed by the same damn game! A thing which hit me suddenly tonight; do we know if there's some kind of failsafe to prevent SBurb from arising on the reward planet? I don't think it was ever said. As I said on Tumblr about the players' apparent lack of concern over whether the game will come back:
Would it be a Just death if SBurb came back and they didn't try to stop it? A Heroic one if they did?
If they were left behind on their planet after the meteors, they'd probably just end up hanging out in the Exiles' new carapacian civilization a few hundred years in the future. What would happen if they tried to play Sburb a second time, though? would the game even allow it? What if they managed to get into the Medium through the meteor portals?
see that's the thing I've always wanted a goddamn answer to here the trolls didn't make it into their created universe, Earth, so they had to keep playing. and the Alternian trolls are made from a scratch, which means they wouldn't have any people who won SBURB to make their planet. but what about Beforus? they played the game and everyone died, as far as we know. their exiles weren't other trolls, we never heard them mention anyone who'd fit the God Tiered players you'd expect from a SBURB session, but their planet WAS, as far as we know, made by a version of the game, since that seems to be how the cycle works. so who made it and where are they and what happened to them?? like, SBURB appears to be a cycle of sorts--you play, you win, a new universe is made, but inevitably SBURB shows up and destroys that universe and people from it play their own session of SBURB to make a universe, and if they fail along the way you can scratch the session if things have been done correctly, which makes a different universe of sorts that wasn't created by a won session of SBURB. which means it's a never-ending thing, as far as we can tell. so that means there has to be at least one universe out there where SBURB showed up and destroyed the created universe with the old players in it. but we never see any players who fit that description. so what the fuck happens to these people if they're in the new universe when SBURB goes down
Maybe it isn't supposed to destroy the universe, only one individual planet that isn't the one the previous session's Sburb players live on?
I mean admittedly Alternia is apparently the capital planet of an 'interstellar empire', which implies that they've conquered other planets, although we don't know if anyone else lived on them, but again Alternia is not a world created by a won SBURB session so perhaps I shouldn't use them to try and figure this out we don't know about Beforus or Earth, in regards to other planets with life on them it's possible there weren't any it's also possible there were some, I guess, but then....why do SBURB at all? why is it necessary? and why that specific planet? and what happens to any other planets? I mean....the planets destroyed by the Reckoning meteors end up inhabited by the exiles from the particular SBURB game being played, but wouldn't another race come check out the planet at some point, or something? but mostly just, why is SBURB a thing that happens if it's just to one planet and not a cycle of rebirth type of thing? what if you just refuse to play? does SBURB try and find another planet in the same universe? why?
In the end didn't Rose end up believing that the issues with her mom were mostly her own fault for being ungrateful? That's not great. Also I figured that if you have god tier players that live to their planet playing SBURB... you get Horrorterrors. Where after long enough their physical forms change and may choose to live in the Void or around their planet or whatever. (Not saying that the kids would end up looking all tentacley (well rose might) - they'd end up probably looking like, idk, many arms and eyes, 10 feet tall, probably glowing. Basically the idea is that if a horrorterror is a magnified squiddle then the kids would look like magnified humans.)
Since all reproductive methods involve redundancy, I figured SBurb only destroys the planet it's played on, but a version of SBurb will appear on every sufficiently tech-advanced planet. Most sessions are stated to fail, so it's gotta be played by as many people as possible in order to get as many new universes happening as possible.
