The tension got drained out of everything. Vriska-based victory violated one of the cardinal rules of How Not to Write a Novel: "Where there is a plan, things cannot go according to it."
"Rule" was probably the wrong word then; the book in question advises against doing same on the grounds that it drains all the tension. I spent the whole final-battle sequence going "Yes, and...? What's gonna go wrong...?" and then nothing did, and it makes the victory feel really cheap and pointless. Everything was set up to make Vriska look like an egotistical blowhard who was going to fail horribly, and instead it turned into showing off how awesome she was in a way which made her not actually look very awesome because the writer was on her side. Come to think of setups which didn't get fulfilled, I was expecting freed rage-rampaging Gamzee to attack Aranea, not Terezi. Terezi was stabbing him, yes, but ultimately it was Aranea's fault and when she freed him earlier he seemed to be aware she was screwing with his head.
Honestly, whether rule was the right word or not, it doesn't matter to me because I didn't have any problems with it. Perhaps because so much had already gone wrong all the fucking time I was ready for something to go not-wrong for once.
I mean, if we're just complaining about the ending of homestuck some more that's fine. Lots of people don't like it. I was just amused by the idea that the end was specifically bad because it concluded tension. X3 Like, sure, if you think the things leading up to the ending were bad then that's a conversation to have (that's been happening at length forever) but the idea that a story is bad because it ended and tension was gone was what I wanted to respond to.
I don't really know how to explain it better. I feel like it was building up to a massive epic multi-page thing and then we got "pretty art, easy kill, there you go", and it kind of feels like the whole comic was making a fuss over nothing if taking down the big bad was that easy. And the lives of billions of alternate selves were at risk, but they were alt-selves and already effectively dead or at least not cared about, and the main cast had Jane's Lifey Thing so it never really felt like they were at risk. Better explanation; losing tension is kind of the point of the ending, but I feel like it was lost in the wrong place.
That's cool, you don't have to like the ending. You write good fic that let your readers have a different experience if they want and that's great. Thank you for that! c:
Thank you :) I wish I was actually any good at writing super epic stuff myself so I could write an ending I did like, but I'm absolute shit at time travel stuff. Maybe we should have a thread for coming up with alternate bits of various canons we don't like?
That seems like a good idea, and I can see a lot of writing prompts and cool meta coming out of it. Sign me up.
yeah so it's not exactly an eternal safety net. if you die, you can be revived that one time. and then you're dead forever. so....there was DANGER. just not necessarily as much as would have existed without Jane.
Okay, read some fic and now I see a reason I don't like most Davekat. When they're paired up in fanfic, they so often seem to lose their snark. It's so much more fun if they're quipping at each other like they did in Penis Ouija era and I don't see them stopping that if they hooked up.
i think a lot of people would agree with you, there :’D i love davekat (gosh, who could have guessed) and a lot of fic definitely defangs them to the point of being boring. it’s more for the shipping gripes thread, but i have a lot of thoughts about fandom turning them into the “pure canon healthy mlems”
Like, they say Karkat's trying to perform all four quadrants at once, but then they always leave out the blackrom.
I miss the ultra-violent interpretation of the Tricksters. It's cliche, I know, but I want my candy gore!
