ooooooh I like this one. I also appreciate the -y endings :P polyarbitry, polyamity, polyamory, and polyantagony!!!! THIS IS THE BEST DAY
Battle-rapping a la And It Don't Stop is a really fun idea but I am the worst at coming up with raps ever. Wish I was better at it so I could work it into a fic.
Well, it's Ampora-heavy and I figure they'd be horrible at rapping too. They can do some other kind of music instead. What I'm working on now is a non-game AU but fraymotifs still should be a thing because it's cool.
Come to think of it, can slam poetry battles be done in the manner of the gonnagles by hurting your opponent with the worst rapping possible? Because I'm wondering if it wouldn't be too silly to include that being Tavros' special battle skill in a fic that's supposed to be dark. What would Doc Scratch be in a non-game AU? I always picture a human but one of my favourites had him as the limeblood legislacerator Scrach. My friend suggested a malevolent trickster god.
Since one of the things I didn't like about the ending was Bec Noir slotting neatly in as a replacement for Spades Slick, and I'm making the pre- and post-Scratch incarnations of players different people, should I make Slick and Snowman different people from Jack Noir and the Black Queen? I already have a lot of characters running around and I'm not sure how I'd work that, but just having them show up briefly as an establishing point might work.
oh yeah, I'm still really annoyed about that too. Especially when there was a perfect opportunity to get Karkat, mr aspect-of-connections prior-bond-with-spades felt-betrayed-by-jack-which-was-never-resolved, to talk to spades and get him to switch sides since spades really had no beef whatsoever with the kids and exclusively attacked Jack English until Dirk, Dave, and Terezi kept attacking him (for no reason!) and he fought back. ...anyways yeah that seems like a good idea.
Quoth one of the many ending-hate posts I found: Spoiler: ending discourse Speaking of, there's a really, really impressive number of parallels between the retcon timeline and Caliborn's Homosuck. If it isn't intentional, it's frightening.
.....okay but what if, as a Lord of Time, Caliborn was able to control some of the timeline or something like that AND SOME OF IT IS ACTUALLY BECAUSE OF HIM
Malevolent demonic entity would fit, yeah. Lackey of something worse, but reasonably powerful and horrible in his own right and one of the worst things about him is that he sees nearly everything that happens. Not everything, the kinder gods allow for there to be shadows where he cannot see - but you can't guarantee you're in one of those shadows all the time, and he's certainly not going to admit it to you if any of your deeds are hidden to him. The most you can hope for is that he doesn't find you interesting enough, or useful enough, to be worth paying attention to; you can't hope for him to not see you at all, that's too likely to get his attention to begin with.
@chaoticArbiter An awful lot of people who hated the ending have pointed out parallels between it and Homosuck! See here, here, and this addition to that post I shared above. I kinda hope it was intentional because if it wasn't it's scary. Spoiler: example - ending discourse
@Morgan Jae @turtleDove That would make sense with the AU I'm doing! I've got the cherubs as gods, but even the good ones are so dangerous that the main method of worship is begging them to stay a safe distance away. Doc Scratch as the supernatural right-hand man of Caliborn's daddy and later Caliborn himself would work pretty well.
Does anyone else really, really wonder what pre-Scratch Bro's childhood was like? Before I saw the post about Lil Cal's influence I had to wonder what his life was like that the way he treated Dave made sense to him.
Yeah, as far as we know I think he’s the only one in the pre-Scratch timeline whose meteor didn’t land him in the middle of some kind of support system. I guess we’re not sure about Mom Lalonde’s early life either, but she seems to have met up with Grandpa Harley pretty quick. Do we know if Bro even had any contact with the other guardians pre-Sburb? He obviously knew something about the game, but that could have been coming from Lil’ Cal. He must have had a pretty sad life.
I always figured that either his life was as horrible as he made Dave's life, or his life was incredibly dull and he went overboard in trying to make Dave's life interesting, depending on whether we were supposed to read it as funny or not. (His actions were horrible either way but Hilariously Abusive Childhood is a known trope and Hussie does tend to go for the most offensive humour possible, so I assumed that was what was meant.)
One of the ending posts I linked above went on for a bit about how they don't like the idea of the alt-selves merging, which was always a theory tossed around in the fandom: I can see the point, but I always did want the alts to merge - I hoped Hal wouldn't merge with Dirk, but the ones split off each other by playing the game. I think the distinction I'm drawing here is that the game is a huge imposition on their lives, they never wanted it and in a just world it should not be a thing that anyone has to go through, even though it created them to begin with. If I found out I was an offshoot of the original Chel because of horrifying circumstances beyond my control, I wouldn't be prizing my individuality; I'd want my life back, and I'd find it immensely unfair if one of me got the "prize" while the rest were shafted. And it wouldn't solve everything! It could cause a whole new story arc, just trying to come to terms with all the vastly different timelines in one's head!
I think the difference here is they're thinking in terms of philosophical symbolism while I'm thinking in terms of a conclusion which wouldn't be unspeakably awful for the billions of people currently stuck in the dreambubbles. I can only think of the dreambubbles as a dreary repetitive hellscape and it seems massively unfair to me that only one iteration of any surviving players gets a happy ending. Unless they broke the game sufficiently that others can make universes too?
